BackOps is a San Francisco-based startup developing what it calls the first AI-native operating system for supply chain operations. Founded in 2024 by Sean McCarthy and Henry Ou, the company is targeting the enormous volume of manual, repetitive back-office work that underpins global trade, the spreadsheet wrangling, email chasing, and document handling that consumes supply chain teams every day.
Sean McCarthy, the CEO, was one of the earliest hires at Amazon Shipping where he led global sales, giving him a front-row view of how brittle and labor-intensive logistics operations remain. Henry Ou, the CTO, previously built and led applied machine learning teams at Apple and ByteDance, bringing deep applied-AI expertise to the problem. Together they are building an AI brain that can autonomously execute and coordinate supply chain tasks rather than simply surfacing dashboards.
The BackOps platform ingests data from across a company's logistics stack and applies AI agents to handle order management, shipment tracking, document processing, and exception resolution. Instead of staffing large operations teams to manually reconcile purchase orders, chase carriers, and process customs paperwork, customers can rely on BackOps agents to perform those tasks and escalate only the edge cases that genuinely require human judgment.
BackOps raised a $26 million Series A led by Theory Ventures, with participation from Gradient Ventures, Construct Capital, and 10VC. The company plans to use the capital to scale its team and accelerate a product roadmap aimed at meeting growing demand for AI-driven logistics automation. As an early-stage entrant in a category dominated by legacy supply chain software, BackOps is betting that an AI-first architecture can replace the patchwork of point tools and manual labor that defines modern supply chain back offices.