Ex-Tesla planners’ Atomic raises $12.5M Series A for AI supply-chain control
Atomic, the AI-native supply chain planning platform founded by former Tesla planning leaders, said Tuesday it raised a $12.5 million Series A led by Klass Capital and Madrona to build a control system that connects business objectives to daily purchasing and operating decisions.
Most companies still plan supply with spreadsheets and heroics. Atomic is selling the planning system its founders ran at Tesla as software that can also place the orders when demand or supply shifts.
On Tuesday, 29 September 2026, Atomic said it raised a $12.5 million Series A led by Klass Capital and Madrona. Series A is an early growth round, new cash after a seed. Adrian Schauer of Klass Capital and Matt McIlwain of Madrona join the board. The release is datelined Boston. PR Newswire carried it. The page stamps the release Sep 29, 2026, 06:00 ET, which is 6:00 a.m. Eastern. Those lines are Atomic’s.
Atomic said the money will extend the platform from planning and decision support into a control system. A control system, in the release, connects a company’s business objectives to the operating decisions it makes each day. AI agents extend what a human teammate can do. An agent, here, is software that can carry a step through, not only suggest one. When demand shifts or supply tightens, a planning team has to see what changed, compare responses, and adjust what gets bought, built, or moved. Atomic says it connects that work in one operating model. Teams can improve the logic behind a decision and carry that improvement into the orders the business places every day. Those lines are Atomic’s.
Michael Rossiter, Neal Suidan, and Jeff Goodrich founded the company. The release says the three led Sales and Operations Planning, and planning, at Tesla through the Model 3 ramp, and built a 50-person planning engineering organization. Sales and operations planning, often shortened to S&OP, is the work of lining up what a company expects to sell with what it will buy, make, and move. The company was incubated at DVx Ventures, the firm founded by former Tesla president Jon McNeill. McNeill worked with the team at Tesla and serves on Atomic’s board. Those lines are Atomic’s.
Rossiter, co-founder and chief executive, said: “Most companies can’t justify building the kind of planning engineering team we had at Tesla.” He said they are still running critical parts of the business through legacy software, hundreds of spreadsheets, and individual heroics. He said Atomic gives them that capability as a product. That quotation is his, in the release.
Companies can deploy Atomic’s sales and operations planning layer in about 30 days, using the data they already have. From there, Atomic says it can expand into detailed planning and execution, running alongside a company’s existing ERP rather than making the business rebuild its processes around new software. ERP is the system a company already uses to record orders, inventory, and the rest of its books. Thirty days is Atomic’s figure for that first layer. It is not a claim that a full replacement of the old system is finished in a month.
For DoorDash’s DashMart, the convenience and essentials stores, Atomic says it now automates 90% of purchasing across hundreds of sites. Ninety percent is nine purchases in ten. DashMart migrated to Atomic in about three months, with feature parity and zero business disruption, the release says. Feature parity means the new system covered the jobs the old one did. The team recently used Atomic’s AI to build new purchasing logic for how primary and backup suppliers should be used, in roughly an hour. Atomic then applied that logic across daily purchases, shifting more volume toward primary suppliers and improving gross margins. Gross margin is what is left from a sale after the direct cost of the goods. Those lines are Atomic’s. Nick Palefsky, director of new business verticals at DoorDash, said Atomic has helped the team plan and manage inventory more proactively, so they can keep high service levels even when supply is disrupted. He said turning a forecast into the right purchase at the right site takes judgment the team built over years, including what to carry where and how to substitute when a supplier misses. He said Atomic is how they apply that judgment across the network every day. That quotation is his, in the release.
Good Chop, HelloFresh’s meat-box subscription, used Atomic to cut inventory on hand from eight or nine weeks to four, while more than doubling revenue and expanding its distribution network and product range. Eight or nine weeks down to four is about half the stock sitting in the building. The customer list on the release spells the name GoodChop. Seb Tron, president of Good Chop, said Atomic helped keep inventory under control as the business expanded, and that it is the core engine they use to plan supply and place purchase orders. That quotation is his, in the release.
Atomic’s AI agent platform is called Nucleus. The release says customers already use it every day for S&OP preparation, inventory questions, and supply-risk checks. The new funding will expand the platform and support larger enterprise deployments. An enterprise deployment is a rollout at a bigger company, not a single pilot. The customers the release names are DoorDash’s DashMart, Good Chop (HelloFresh), Starface World, OOFOS, LMNT, and Vincero. The about box says Atomic gives planning teams a model of the business at the product level, recommendations that show their reasoning, and AI agents that take on more of the work as trust builds. The same box names the backers as DVx Ventures, Klass Capital, Madrona, Alumni Ventures, and Sandberg Bernthal Venture Partners. Those names are Atomic’s. The release does not print a valuation, the price this round would put on the whole company.
Daniel Klass, founder and managing partner of Klass Capital, said customers trust Atomic with daily operating decisions and are asking for more. Matt McIlwain, managing director of Madrona, said Madrona backed Atomic at the seed because the founders had lived the problem at Tesla. He said that a year and a half later the platform runs daily purchasing across DoorDash’s DashMart network. He said most enterprise AI stops at a recommendation, and that Atomic acts on the plan and shows its work. He said Madrona is co-leading the round and joining the board. Jon McNeill said the three founders helped build the system that let Tesla operate at a scale and speed traditional supply-chain software was not designed for, and that AI makes it possible to give companies a system that can make and execute decisions, not only better forecasts. Those quotations are in the release. The press contact is Lindsay Mahaney, atomic@meetkickstand.com.
TechCrunch published a same-day exclusive by Sean O’Kane. It confirms the $12.5 million Series A, led by Klass Capital and Madrona, and the three co-founders. Rossiter told TechCrunch that running a supply chain is like an infinite search for the best decisions, and that those decisions keep changing. He said AI can find the best paths through that forest. That quotation is his, in the interview. The exclusive also quotes McNeill, who is on the board, on DoorDash-scale customers and on the product moving from recommendations toward decisions. The 90 percent purchasing line for DashMart is on Atomic’s release. TechCrunch’s page credits the photograph to Atomic.
In plain terms, three people who planned Tesla’s Model 3 ramp have a Boston company that says it raised $12.5 million, led by Klass Capital and Madrona, to turn that planning stack into software. Atomic says DashMart already runs most of its purchasing on it, and that Good Chop cut weeks of inventory while revenue more than doubled. The new money is for agents that connect a company’s goals to the orders it places when demand or supply moves. The release does not put a price on the whole company.
The picture is Atomic’s co-founders, Michael Rossiter, Neal Suidan, and Jeff Goodrich, seated together. The Atomic name is in the frame. TechCrunch published the still with its same-day exclusive, and the image credit on that page is Atomic. It is a photograph of the three founders.