Kheops raises 15 million euros from ODYSSEY Venture, ISAI and Elaia. Founded in 2021 by Caroline Poinsignon and Thibault Boyeux, the French company first tackled the complexity of purchases made directly between stores and suppliers. With more than 500 stores, 3,000 suppliers and 200,000 products listed on its platform, it now wants to use the data generated by these exchanges to recommend assortments and anticipate orders. A progressive shift in its value, from workflow to commercial decision.
For decades, mass distribution has built its efficiency on centralization. Purchasing centers made it possible to concentrate volumes, negotiate commercial conditions and standardize a large part of supplies. A model which remains extremely efficient for managing large volumes with a controlled number of suppliers, but which is much less efficient when a store wants to differentiate its offer.
Local products, emerging brands, innovations or references adapted to a particular clientele require increasing direct relationships with suppliers. However, each new relationship generates its own operational cycle: product referencing, orders, deliveries, invoicing and payments.
It is on this complexity that Kheops has built its activity.
Industrialize what escapes purchasing centers
Founded in 2021 by Caroline Poinsignon and Thibault BoyeuxKheops is developing a platform intended to centralize direct commercial relations between stores and suppliers.
The company describes this market as “direct commerce”, a term which here does not designate direct-to-consumer, but purchases made by points of sale from suppliers outside, or in addition to, centralized supply circuits.
The promise is to enable a store to work with more suppliers without correspondingly increasing the administrative burden needed to manage them.
The platform thus supports different stages of the commercial relationship, from connection to product referencing, then orders, delivery, invoicing and payment.
For the distributor, the interest is to be able to increase the granularity of its assortment, while for the supplier, it is a question of accessing more points of sale and increasing the volumes achieved with stores that are already customers. Kheops indicates that it observes an average increase of 20% in turnover per store among suppliers using its platform.
Behind this automation appears above all an economic equation, that of making the long tail of mass distribution purchases manageable.
500 stores, 3,000 suppliers and 200,000 products
After five years of development, Kheops is beginning to have a more significant critical mass. The company now claims deployment in more than 500 storesgiving access to more than 200,000 products from more than 3,000 suppliers. Several tens of millions of euros in orders pass through its platform each year.
Over the last twelve months, the volume of orders managed has multiplied by four and Kheops’ turnover by three.
The company also indicates that it works with the main French players in mass distribution and has recently entered into a partnership with Crossroads.
These figures measure the commercial development of Kheops, but they also allow another reading of its trajectory. Each transaction produces information on the relationships between suppliers, products and stores: ordered references, volumes, frequency, location and even commercial performance.
As the network expands, this data can become an asset at least as important as the software that enables transactions.
From workflow to decision
It is precisely at this level that Kheops now wants to develop its product. Until now, the platform mainly answered one question: how to simply manage a multitude of direct purchases?
The next step is to answer another one: what products should you buy?
Kheops plans to invest more in artificial intelligence and the exploitation of data generated by its platform. In particular, the company wants to be able to offer each store a personalized assortment according to its catchment area and its performance, then to anticipate its needs thanks to automatic order recommendations.
On the supplier side, the same infrastructure must make it possible to better identify the commercial potential of the different points of sale.
The product value chain then gradually lengthens:
reference → order → pay → analyze → recommend → anticipate.
The change may seem limited on a functional level, but it is much more important from an economic point of view.
Workflow software executes a decision made by its user, when a recommendation system intervenes before this decision.
The value created is then no longer based solely on the administrative time saved, but potentially on the ability to increase turnover, improve product rotation or reduce assortment errors.
Assortment becomes a data problem
This development comes at a time when the personalization of assortments is considerably increasing the number of decisions to be made in retail. The more centralized the offer, the more these decisions can be made at the scale of a brand or a region. The more local it becomes, the more complex the equation becomes. It is no longer just a question of determining whether a reference should be marketed, but of knowing which product to sell, in which store, at what time and in what quantity.
The interest of Kheops then potentially lies in the position occupied between several market players, because the platform does not only see the sales of a product in a store, but connects suppliers to several points of sale and stores to several suppliers.
If this transactional depth becomes sufficient, Kheops could gradually constitute a much finer representation of the circulation of products in distribution networks.
It is also at this level that part of its barrier to entry could be built. While software features can be reproduced, a history associating products, suppliers, stores, territories and sales performance is more difficult to reconstruct.
Kheops must still have sufficiently deep data, the capacity to exploit them and the necessary rights to do so. The elements communicated by the company do not yet make it possible to measure the quality of this potential advantage.
Between procurement, marketplace and commercial intelligence
This development brings Kheops closer to several categories of actors without any of them exactly reproducing its positioning.
Mirakl provides large retailers with the infrastructure to integrate and manage third-party sellers and suppliers at scale, primarily through marketplace and dropship models. Ankorstore organizes meetings and transactions between brands and independent retailers. Chocolate automates, particularly with artificial intelligence, order taking between food distributors and their professional customers.
Kheops approaches the problem from another entry point, that direct purchases from the storein addition to centralized supplies.
Its main competitor therefore often remains the existing system: purchasing centers, ERP, EDI, spreadsheets, emails and manual processes used to manage suppliers that escape standard circuits, but the boundaries between these different markets could gradually become closer.
If Kheops manages to exploit the data accumulated between suppliers, products, stores, territories and sales performance, its advantage will no longer rest solely on order automation. The company would then seek to build a assortment intelligence layerbetween the distributor’s transactional systems and the buyer’s decision.
15 million euros to change scale
It is this new phase that must finance 15 million euros raised from ODYSSEY Venture, ISAI and Elaiain an operation mediated by Ader.
Kheops first plans to accelerate its deployment in France and strengthen its teams. Around thirty recruitments are announced in the coming months, particularly in commercial and technological functions. Part of the capital will be devoted to technological developments and artificial intelligence. The company then wants to prepare for its international development after having consolidated its French presence.
