KHEOPS raises €12 million to turn retail procurement data into assortment intelligence

KHEOPS has raised €12 million from ODYSSÉE Venture, ISAI and Elaia. Founded in 2021 by Caroline Poinsignon and Thibault Boyeux, the French company initially focused on simplifying direct purchasing between stores and suppliers. With more than 500 stores, 3,000 suppliers and 200,000 products now connected to its platform, KHEOPS is moving further up the value chain: using transaction data to recommend assortments and anticipate orders. The company is gradually shifting from workflow software to retail decision intelligence.

For decades, large-scale retail has been built around centralisation. Central purchasing organisations aggregate volumes, negotiate commercial terms and standardise procurement across store networks.

The model remains highly efficient when retailers are buying large volumes from a relatively limited number of suppliers. It becomes less efficient, however, when individual stores need to differentiate their offering.

Local products, emerging brands, new categories and products tailored to specific customer profiles all require retailers to manage a growing number of direct supplier relationships.

Each relationship adds another operational layer: supplier onboarding, product listing, ordering, delivery, invoicing and payment.

KHEOPS has built its business around managing that complexity.

Industrialising the long tail of retail procurement

Founded in 2021 by Caroline Poinsignon and Thibault Boyeux, KHEOPS operates a platform designed to centralise direct commercial relationships between stores and suppliers.

The company calls this market “direct commerce”. In this context, the term does not refer to direct-to-consumer models, but to purchases made directly by stores from suppliers outside, or alongside, centralised procurement channels.

The proposition is straightforward: allow a store to work with a much larger number of suppliers without increasing its administrative workload at the same rate.

KHEOPS covers several stages of the commercial relationship, from connecting stores with suppliers and onboarding products to ordering, delivery, invoicing and payment.

For retailers, the objective is to make assortments more granular and better adapted to individual stores. For suppliers, the platform provides access to a wider network of points of sale while also increasing business with existing retail customers.

KHEOPS says suppliers using its platform generate, on average, 20% more revenue per store.

Behind the workflow automation lies a broader economic proposition: making the long tail of retail procurement operationally manageable.

500 stores, 3,000 suppliers and 200,000 products

Five years after its creation, KHEOPS is beginning to reach a more significant level of scale.

The company says its platform is now deployed across more than 500 stores, connecting them with more than 3,000 suppliers and over 200,000 products. Tens of millions of euros in orders are processed through the platform every year.

Over the past twelve months, the volume of orders handled by KHEOPS has increased fourfold, while the company says its revenue has tripled.

KHEOPS also works with several of France’s largest grocery retailers and recently signed a partnership with Carrefour.

These figures are primarily indicators of commercial traction. But they also reveal another dimension of the company’s development.

Every transaction generates information about the relationships between products, suppliers and stores: what is ordered, in what volumes, how frequently, in which locations and, potentially, with what level of commercial performance.

As the network grows, this transaction data could become at least as strategically important as the software layer used to manage the transactions themselves.

From workflow automation to retail decisions

This is where KHEOPS now intends to take its product.

Until now, the platform has primarily addressed an operational question: how can retailers manage thousands of direct purchasing relationships efficiently?

The next question is more strategic: what should each store buy?

KHEOPS plans to invest more heavily in artificial intelligence and in the exploitation of the data generated across its platform.

The company wants to recommend personalised assortments for individual stores based on their catchment area and performance, and eventually anticipate purchasing requirements through automated order recommendations.

For suppliers, the same infrastructure could help identify which stores offer the greatest commercial potential for a particular product.

The product stack therefore expands progressively:

onboard → order → pay → analyse → recommend → anticipate.

Functionally, the change may appear incremental. Economically, it is more significant.

Workflow software helps users execute decisions that have already been made. Recommendation systems move upstream and begin to influence those decisions.

The value proposition therefore shifts from administrative efficiency towards commercial performance: higher sales, better product rotation, fewer assortment errors and potentially lower levels of unsold inventory.

Assortment is becoming a data problem

The evolution comes as retail assortment decisions are becoming increasingly granular.

In a highly centralised retail model, many purchasing decisions can be taken at national or regional level. As assortments become more localised, the number of variables increases.

Retailers no longer need to answer only whether a product should be listed. They increasingly need to determine which product should be sold, in which store, at what time and in what quantity.

KHEOPS’ potential advantage lies in its position between multiple sides of the retail ecosystem.

The platform does not simply observe the performance of one product in one store. It connects multiple suppliers with multiple points of sale, while simultaneously giving each store access to a broad supplier network.

At sufficient scale, this could allow KHEOPS to build a much more granular view of how products move through retail networks.

This is also where part of its potential defensibility may emerge.

Software functionality can be replicated. A historical dataset linking products, suppliers, stores, territories, purchasing patterns and commercial performance is considerably harder to recreate.

That advantage remains conditional, however.

KHEOPS still needs sufficient depth and quality of data, the ability to turn that data into useful recommendations, and the contractual and regulatory rights required to exploit it. Based on the information currently disclosed by the company, it is too early to determine how strong that data advantage may become.

Between procurement software, marketplaces and retail intelligence

KHEOPS increasingly sits at the intersection of several software and commerce categories, without mapping precisely onto any of them.

Mirakl provides major retailers with the infrastructure required to onboard and manage third-party sellers and suppliers at scale, particularly through marketplace and dropship models.

Ankorstore focuses on transactions between brands and independent retailers.

Choco automates ordering between food distributors and professional customers, increasingly using artificial intelligence to digitise transactions that have traditionally remained highly manual.

KHEOPS approaches the market from a different entry point: direct purchasing at store level, alongside centralised procurement.

Its most immediate competitor is therefore often not another startup, but the retailer’s existing infrastructure: purchasing organisations, ERP systems, EDI, spreadsheets, email and manual processes used to manage suppliers that sit outside standard procurement flows.

Those boundaries could nevertheless become increasingly blurred.

If KHEOPS succeeds in extracting intelligence from the data accumulated across suppliers, products, stores, geographies and commercial performance, its value proposition will extend well beyond order automation.

The company would effectively be building an assortment intelligence layer between the retailer’s transactional systems and the buyer’s decision.

€12 million to scale the model

The €12 million round backed by ODYSSÉE Venture, ISAI and Elaia is intended to finance that next phase. The transaction was advised by Ader.

KHEOPS plans first to accelerate its deployment in France and expand its workforce.

Around thirty hires are expected over the coming months, particularly across sales and technology.

Part of the capital will also be allocated to product development and artificial intelligence, as the company seeks to move from digitising direct procurement workflows towards recommending and eventually anticipating purchasing decisions.

International expansion is expected to follow once KHEOPS has further consolidated its position in the French market.

The strategic question is therefore no longer simply whether KHEOPS can digitise a fragmented segment of retail procurement. It is whether the transaction layer it has built can generate enough data to become a decision layer for retailers.