InstaLILY launches world's first 'AI Forward Deployed Engineer' for distributors
InstaLILY AI, backed by a $60 million Series B round of funding led by Energize Capital, has launched "Lily," the world's first AI Forward Deployed Engineer designed for distributors.
Lily goes into a business, learns how it works, builds what the work needs, and gets it running by finding revenue, pricing quotes, planning routes, and diagnosing equipment in the field. Unlike a traditional demo or pilot, it runs the business with people in control, and it goes live in days versus months. After launch, it keeps shipping and gets better the longer it runs.
According to the company, the bottleneck in enterprise AI has shifted from the technology to deployment, which isn't a one-time event. Enterprise environments are complex and constantly in motion, including systems, data, regulations, the models themselves. Whatever goes into them decays without something actively keeping it working. That's the real job of the forward deployed engineer, the role enterprise AI now runs on. Shipping AI is just the start, as keeping it functional while everything around it moves is the actual work.
People in this role work in bursts, according to InstaLILY. They embed, build, and move on, and what they built starts drifting the day they leave. Lily remains deployed and keeps deploying as the business changes, so the software keeps pace rather than falling behind, offering a permanent presence instead of a revolving door.
Lily can do this, they stated, because it has learned from thousands of hours of real-world deployment work. Those patterns come from AI shipped into live businesses and kept running there, not demos or benchmarks. It arrives already knowing how the work gets done. Most AI assists a person, such as a coding agent for a developer or a copilot for an analyst. Lily builds and runs the software that does the work.
"Every company is full of work that only it knows how to do, in sales, in operations, out in the field, work too specific for off-the-shelf software, so it runs on legacy systems and manual workarounds," said Amit Shah, founder and CEO of InstaLILY. "Lily turns that work into software, and it is running in days, not quarters."
Insight Partners also participated in the funding and has increased its investment. New strategic investors include Home Depot Ventures and United Rentals. The round brings the company's total raised to nearly $100 million, and revenue grew 5 time over the past year.
At a national distributor, the software Lily built finds and pursues revenue across the entire customer base beyond what any sales team could cover by hand, generating more than $200 million in new annual sales. At an industrial supplier, pricing a complex RFQ was slow, manual work; now quotes come back faster, giving the commercial team hundreds of thousands of hours back per year. At a field service company, a technician spent 15 minutes diagnosing each problem; now it takes under 10 seconds, and the cost to serve a call dropped 98 percent. A logistics operator that planned routes in 15 minutes now does it in 3. A services company cut the time to train a new field rep by more than 60 percent. In healthcare, administrative and operational work that used to crawl now moves in minutes.
"At our scale, enterprise AI can start falling behind the minute it goes live because the business never stops changing," said Chief Digital, AI & Innovation Officer Patrick Garcia at SRS Distribution, part of The Home Depot family. "Lily has helped us build the software our teams need while working within the enterprise platforms, governance, and processes we've already established. That allows us to move much faster without compromising the standards required to operate at scale."
Through its work with Google DeepMind, InstaLILY built a hybrid architecture that pairs a large model for hard reasoning with a small model for fast, routine, and sensitive work, and routes each task to whichever one fits. The small model runs close to the work on InstaLILY's Small Data Center, built with NVIDIA technology, in the cloud, on-premise, or at the edge. Customer data stays private, and the system runs at lower latency, lower cost, and less energy.
Since its Series A, InstaLILY has gone live with some of the largest operators in construction, industrial distribution, logistics, and healthcare, including companies within The Home Depot family (SRS Distribution), United Rentals, ShipStation Global (Thoma Bravo, CVC Capital Partners), PartsTown, Radwell International, Henry Schein, PartsSource (Bain Capital) and Kedrion Biopharma (Permira, AIDA). The company has also opened new offices in San Francisco, London, and Toronto.
"United Rentals is focused on innovative solutions to help our customers and employees be more productive," said Tony Leopold, Chief Technology & Strategy Officer at United Rentals. "We're excited to invest in and support InstaLILY's continued growth and innovation."
InstaLILY will use the funding to help Lily learn faster, take on more of the work, expand into new industries, and grow the team. The company will also continue building the Small Data Center, the infrastructure that makes always-on intelligence possible inside a business, at a cost and energy profile enterprises can sustain.
INDUSTRIAL SUPPLY MAGAZINE
The July/August issue of Industrial Supply magazine features an in-depth cover story about Global Industrial. Plus, we're featuring articles by contributing writers Dr. Bharani Nagarathnam and Frank Hurtte, as well as interviews with numerous product and distribution industry experts.
