Two months ago, former top Amazon executive Dave Clark raised a $100 million Series A war chest for Auger, his new AI-powered software startup that he envisions transforming the global supply-chain sector.
Now, the former Amazon consumer business CEO and supply-chain chief has hired an executive team of top veteran technologists—including many former Amazon leaders—to help bring that vision to fruition.
Among them are three current and former Amazon vice presidents, including Russell Allgor, Amazon’s longtime chief scientist for its massive global logistics operations; Sanjay Dash, who helped lead the development of Amazon’s “Just Walk Out” and pay-with-your-palm in-store technologies in recent years; and Alex Ceballos, a former longtime corporate development executive who helped oversee Amazon’s crucial acquisition of Kiva, the core of Amazon’s warehouse robotics operations.
All but one of the startup’s 11 senior hires previously worked at Amazon, with the majority having spent at least a decade at the Seattle-based tech giant.
“We share a very foundational belief of customers first … and building from customers backwards,” Clark said in an interview with Fortune. “This tends to be a very old-school population of Amazon people who are very meritocracy-focused and believe both companies’ and people’s success is based on what you deliver for customers and what you can deliver for your teams.”
Clark’s vision for Auger, as Fortune previously reported, is to build a modern operating system for global supply chains that collects and normalizes datasets from disparate supply-chain systems—like demand planners and transportation management software—and then incorporates AI to produce dashboards and automation that provide answers in near real-time to pressing supply-chain questions.
“The problem when you get data from all these different sources is that things don’t mean the same thing [across different systems],” Clark said. “A container in one system means a 40-foot ocean container. In another it means a 53-foot trailer.”
Clark said that deep Amazon experience was not the only—or even most important—qualifying trait for his executive hires. Several members of the founding team—two co-heads of technology and the head of customer success—possess complementary experience and expertise focused on working with complex data structures at scale.
AJ Wilhoit, Auger’s chief product officer, was hired from another supply-chain startup, Project44, where she held the same role. She worked under Clark briefly at Flexport and previously spent 13 years at Amazon.
Then there’s Allgor, the chief scientist who has worked at Amazon since he was hired as the tech giant’s first research scientist nearly 25 years ago.
“He was … some of my personal secret sauce over the years” because he was “deep and rich in understanding of how end-to-end supply chains operate and optimize,” Clark said.
Clark himself spent 23 years at Amazon, retiring from the company in 2022 as CEO of its global consumer business, where he reported to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and later to his successor, Andy Jassy. Before that, he ran the Amazon division that housed its warehousing, transportation, and delivery operations. Clark went on to spend less than a year in a brief, turbulent stint as chief executive of supply-chain startup Flexport.
With a potential tariff war on the horizon as President-elect Donald Trump takes office, Clark believes Auger will be coming to market at a time when its technology will be more important than ever for businesses.
“CEOs and chief financial officers are like, ‘Chief Supply Chain Officer, what do we do? What’s the outcome? What’s the financial impact? How much inventory should we buy?’” Clark said. “It’s absorbing, I would suspect, an immense amount of mental bandwidth and human capacity that is not focused on running the business day-to-day anymore.”
Clark said Auger will have around 35 employees by the end of January, with a goal of demoing the product by late winter for a target customer base that falls into the range between the Fortune 50 and Fortune 2000. That would put the startup on track to launch a minimal viable product with a few customers by late spring or early summer, Clark said.
