Cavela: Making Any Product Possible & Remaking E-Commerce
Sometimes you meet a founder who has such a rare blend of skills, knowledge, and lived experience that they’re perfectly positioned remake an industry through a new lens. That’s Anthony Sardain, Founder & CEO of Cavela. He’s a data scientist who built text-based AI tools for major retailers. He also grew up in Asia and Latin America with family working in global trade, and has seen how complex supply chains work up close. Today, his team is launching Cavela to tackle the biggest unsolved problem in E-Commerce: working with suppliers to make new products.
Just as Shopify changed the way merchants reach and interact with customers, Cavela is stepping in to reinvent the way they reach and interact with manufacturers around the world. It’s a problem of enormous magnitude — with product makers spending weeks and months finding the right vendors, negotiating pricing, discussing all the details, coordinating samples, and more. It’s a process that regularly results in thousand-email long chains of confusing back-and-forth that too often results in poor quality and costly mistakes. The larger the scale, the harder it is.
Anthony and his team at Cavela saw all these pain points, and figured out how to automate away most of them with AI, while also saving businesses 40% in operational costs. How are they doing this? Cavela is a single platform that ingests what you’re looking to make and quickly matches you with suppliers who are not only best suited to make the item for you, but optimized based on cost. It then uses AI to automate communication with suppliers — including quotes, negotiation, simple questions, and sample coordination. This cuts the process down from hundreds of hours and emails to only a few, and organizes all interactions in one easily searchable, navigable place.
Whether you’re running an e-commerce company, or making a team t-shirt for your division at work, you don’t have to wonder whether you’re working with the best possible manufacturer — Cavela finds the ideal fits for you out of a global network of hundreds of thousands. You don’t have to worry about getting the right price, or missing a critical note, or having the wrong thing made. It’s handled.
What do we mean by “any physical product,” you ask? Truly anything your imagination can dream up. It’s one of the things that most captured our imaginations here at XYZ about Cavela.
E-commerce companies can use it to develop new product lines faster than ever before.
Startups can use it to make truly special, unique swag no one else will be able to copy.
Boutique brands can use it to make and sell their own merchandise for more revenue.
If you ever wanted your own design of umbrellas, toolboxes, sneakers, lip gloss, pillow cases, yo-yos, place mats, door mats, dog collars, face masks, wristbands, chocolates, phone chargers, spatulas, pickleball racquets, inner tubes, jigsaw puzzles, wall decals (the list could truly go on and on and on this way), Cavela can get it made.
Anthony isn’t the only member of the team ideally suited to building a huge business around this. With deep experience in both procurement and AI, his colleagues come from Stripe, Google, Amazon, and Disney. They’ve run large e-commerce brands themselves, and together have one of the world’s strongest networks across supplier hubs in Asia and Latin America.
With all of this momentum, we here at XYZ have high conviction that Cavela is going to change the way this huge part of e-commerce works. That’s why we’re so happy to be leading their $2 million funding round to launch the platform, alongside Propel Ventures and Go Global Ventures.
If you’re reading this and interested in learning more, let us know! You can email me, Camille, at camille@xyz.vc and we may have a way to get you a partner discount!
