Canals has raised a $35 million Series A funding round to accelerate the development and deployment of its cloud-native artificial intelligence workflow suite. The investment marks a major milestone for the Miami-based startup, which has quietly positioned itself as the first operating AI platform for the heavily underserved wholesale distribution, manufacturing, and industrial supply chain markets.
The funding round was led exclusively by Base10 Partners, a prominent venture capital firm known for backing technological innovations that automate the real economy. The firm’s portfolio includes industry giants like Stripe, Figma, and Notion.
The new capital will be used to aggressively expand Canals’ engineering footprint and rapidly build out additional end-to-end transactional tools tailored for global suppliers, distributors, and contractors.
Automating the Complexities of the Real Economy
While high-profile generative AI startups frequently target consumer tech or creative industries, Canals has taken a highly specialised approach by tackling the foundational backend friction points of global commerce. Wholesale distribution represents a massive $8.2 trillion global ecosystem. However, it remains heavily reliant on manual processes due to the inherent complexity of its supply chains.
In a typical distribution workflow, transaction inputs are messy and fragmented. Invoices, purchase orders and product lists arrive from thousands of distinct vendors in mismatched formats ranging from unformatted spreadsheets, handwritten physical notes, and unstructured PDFs to voice messages and complex email chains. Historically, processing these inputs required manual review by experienced staff who relied on years of institutional product knowledge to map data accurately into enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems.
Source: canals ai
Canals bridges this gap by offering specialised enterprise AI models that interpret unstructured data with immense precision. Instead of forcing distributors or their clients to conform to rigid, pre-defined templates, the Canals platform instantly reads, extracts, and translates incoming client asks into ERP-ready, structured documents within minutes.
“Our customers operate in the real world, with messy inputs, imperfect data, and constant change, which made automation difficult to impossible before AI,” said Michael Delgado, CEO and co-founder of Canals, in a statement accompanying the announcement. “We’ve built the most accurate AI for wholesale distribution to finally free teams from manual data entry and enable stronger relationships across the supply chain.”
More News: Orbital Industries Raises $50M to Scale AI Hardware
Capital Efficiency and Major Enterprise Trust
One of the most remarkable aspects of Canals’ trajectory is its capital efficiency. Before securing its Series A round from Base10 Partners, the company achieved massive enterprise scale entirely through organic growth and customer revenue, operating without initial institutional venture backing.
To date, the Canals platform has processed more than 8 million sales orders and eclipsed $5 billion in payables across its user base. The company’s software is currently deployed at more than 100 wholesale distributors globally. This roster includes prominent industry market leaders such as DSG, Locke Supply, and The Kendall Group.
According to customer metrics cited by the company, distributors utilising Canals have successfully doubled their quote conversion rates due to drastically faster response times. Furthermore, backend operations have achieved up to 96% touchless invoice processing, allowing finance teams to pivot from manually fixing individual line-item invoice errors to supervising high-level corporate payment strategies.
“From conversations with many Canals customers as well as our own contacts in wholesale distribution, we kept hearing the same thing over and over again: Canals is customer-obsessed and delivers outstanding ROI,” noted Jason Kong, General Partner at Base10 Partners. “They’re outperforming others marketing similar solutions by orders of magnitude, so it was an easy decision to partner with Michael and this incredible team.”
With $35 million in fresh capital and an entrenched market position, Canals is poised to lead the digital transformation of industrial logistics, turning manual data friction into an absolute competitive advantage for global supply chains.
