Whitespace

Founder @whitespacehqai (YC S26)

Whitespace is an AI operating system for wholesale distributors that connects to their systems and inboxes to build a living model of their business, then deploys self-improving AI agents to automate work like inventory planning, customer support, and order entry. The launch is aimed at operators running physical goods distribution, where staff still comb through SKUs by hand to decide what to reorder. In the demo, an agent flags understocked items, factors in demand velocity, supplier constraints, and upcoming customer projects, and then drafts purchase orders for a human to approve, moving replenishment work out of spreadsheets and into a conversational workflow. Inventory planning is the wedge, but the same agent layer is being pointed at sales performance analysis and customer service, giving distributors a single surface for tasks that currently sit across ERPs, inboxes, and reporting tools. The launch matters because wholesale distribution is a large, ERP-heavy category that has seen relatively little modern software, and Whitespace is arriving alongside a growing set of YC-backed peers building AI staff for the same buyer. The company is a Y Combinator startup based in London, founded by Alex Tung and Leon Yao. Tung previously worked at BCG and was an early non-engineering hire at Index-backed Ankar, while Yao was a research engineer at InstaDeep working on reinforcement learning for optimization problems, with a machine learning background from UCL. That pairing of enterprise go-to-market and applied ML research shows up in how the product is pitched, less as a chatbot bolted onto existing systems and more as an agent that reasons over the operational data distributors already have.

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