Our Story

The story behind Jonah

Twenty years ago we had the idea. Today, AI makes it possible.

A problem every manufacturer knows

Every company with a large, complex supply chain fights the same daily battle. Suppliers change dates, prices and quantities, schedules shift, and parts run short. Somewhere in a buyer's inbox is the email that would have warned you, if anyone had time to read it closely.

For years the industry's answer has been more software: ERP add-ons and heavy supply chain planning suites. They promise visibility, but they take long, expensive implementations to deliver it. Even then they cover only part of the problem, because most of the real work still happens in emails, spreadsheets and phone calls between buyers and suppliers.

We started Inventry to close that gap.

From a book to an AI agent

It started with a book

Our story goes back to the 2000s. Huub Bouten and Amit Karan were building ERP systems when they read The Goal by Eliyahu M. Goldratt, the novel that introduced the Theory of Constraints. Its central idea stuck with them: every operation is held back by a few constraints, and you get the biggest gains by finding those constraints and focusing on them.

Huub and Amit tried to build a general-purpose platform on that idea. The thinking was sound, but the technology wasn't ready. Software could store data and follow rules. It couldn't read a supplier's email, understand what changed, and decide what mattered.

The missing piece arrives

In 2022, Pooja Brown, then Chief Technology Officer at Stitch Fix, was dealing first-hand with the cost of unforeseen supply chain disruptions. She connected with Amit and Huub, and together they saw that the technology to build the platform they had imagined twenty years earlier finally existed.

Modern AI could do what earlier systems couldn't. It could read unstructured documents, reason about them against ERP data, and talk to people in plain language. That meant you didn't need to replace a company's systems to fix its supply chain. You could build an intelligent layer on top of them.

Meet Jonah

In 2024 we started building Jonah, an AI agent named after the mentor in The Goal. In the book, Jonah doesn't run the plant. He asks the right questions, points to the real constraint, and helps the people running it make better decisions. That's the role we designed our Jonah to play.

Jonah works alongside procurement and inventory teams as a virtual specialist:

Reads everything. Every supplier email, every attachment and every new production schedule.
Connects the dots. Matches each item to the right purchase order and pulls the latest data from the ERP.
Finds what changed. Dates, quantities, prices, terms, units of measure, and parts that are short or at risk.
Tells the right people and helps them act. Suggests next steps, drafts supplier emails, and tracks the responses.

What we've learned so far

Our customers have proven what we believed all along.

At a leading manufacturer of utility vehicles, Jonah analyzed 65 production schedules in two months. It flagged 2,243 parts for follow-up and recommended 350 PO updates and 210 expedites. That turned a team constantly reacting to surprises into one that sees problems coming.

At a leading packaging solutions provider, Jonah read 7,616 supplier confirmation emails in its first month. More than half of them contained a discrepancy, and Jonah caught and flagged every one it could process. The cost of handling each acknowledgement dropped by about 67%.

Every deployment follows the same principle: start with one real use case, measure the baseline, and let Jonah earn trust step by step. It moves from assisting your team, to working alongside it, to handling routine work on its own.

Where we're going

We believe the next generation of supply chain software won't be another system to implement. It will be AI teammates that work inside the systems you already run. Our goal is simple: no buyer should spend their day solving puzzles a machine can solve for them.