GoKawiilPillar, a platform that helps commodity-driven businesses (like those in metals, food, and airline companies) manage financial risk, announced Tuesday a $20 million seed round led by Andreessen Horowitz.
Others in the seed round include Crucible Capital, Gallery Ventures, and Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi. The company has raised $23 million to date.
Pillar, founded in 2023, automates hedging processes for such businesses. Hedging is when a company places a trade that can offset or cancel out losses from other priced trades. Geopolitics has not been kind to the commodities market, which has seen much volatility in the past year.
Harsha Ramesh, the company’s co-founder and CEO (founded alongside Chinmay Deshpande, the company’s CTO), said the company uses AI to ingest and parse data from client contracts, cash flows, inventories, ERP software, spreadsheets, and even WhatsApp messages to “continuously analyze exposure across commodities, FX, and freight.”
It can then build and manage a hedge portfolio for its clients and adjust positions automatically based on “market conditions, volatility, and the client’s risk tolerance,” Ramesh continued. The platform executes trades and continuously monitors risk and exposure, turning hedging from a “static, periodic decision to a continuous, autonomous system,” Ramesh said.
Pillar’s clients include Shibuya Sakura Industries, a trading firm that buys and sells commodities like metals; the recyclable materials company Sigma Recycling; and United Metal Solutions Group, which also recycles and trades metals.
Ramesh was once a macro trader, managing large derivative trading books and working with some of the largest companies in the world as they sought to hedge foreign exchange rates and interest rate exposure, he said. “I also spent time at a medium-sized physical business in import-export,” he recalled.
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