Former Amazon exec Dave Clark is back in Seattle with a startup of his own — and $100M in funding

Dave Clark, the former Amazon Worldwide Consumer CEO and Flexport CEO, is launching a new supply-chain technology startup called Auger, with $100 million in Series A funding from venture capital firm Oak HC/FT.

Drawing on Clark’s experience — including his 23-year tenure at Amazon, much of it spent building the e-commerce giant’s global supply chain — Auger will offer an AI-powered system that unifies data, targets inefficiencies, provides real-time insights and automation, and aims to helps big companies make better decisions.

Clark, who moved his family to Texas when he was working at Amazon, has returned to the Seattle area to launch the new startup, drawn primarily by the supply chain expertise in the region, he said in an interview with GeekWire.

“I think some of the best talent in the world for this particular problem space lives in Seattle,” he said, acknowledging the disruption that the move has caused for his family. “That says a lot about how committed I am to this.”

Auger’s target customers include large Fortune 100 companies, particularly those with complex global supply chains involving manufacturing, distribution, and retail operations. Auger says many companies are still using “disjointed systems patched together from incompatible technologies that don’t communicate effectively.”

It’s a big opportunity: Clark cited a $25 billion estimated total addressable market for supply chain technology, growing at nearly 20% per year, with the potential to reach $50 billion by the early 2030s. In that context, the revenue now generated by the biggest players in the field seems modest, at a few hundred million dollars annually.

Oak HC/FT has offices in Stamford, Conn., and San Francisco. Known for investments in healthcare and fintech, the venture and growth equity firm also has logistics startups in its existing portfolio.

Clark said Auger will use the capital at the outset to build its initial team and technology platform, while also considering potential acquisitions of companies in the field with interesting technology and talent.

Auger’s approach reflects the reputation that Clark developed at Amazon, where he was known for finding and eliminating inefficiencies in his quest to expand and improve the process of getting products to customers.

“Throughout my career, I’ve seen firsthand how broken supply chains impact companies and millions of people: delays that prevent products from reaching shelves, miscommunications that force employees into overtime, higher consumer prices, and inefficiencies that contribute to a growing carbon footprint,” he wrote in a LinkedIn post Tuesday morning.

“These aren’t just business problems—they’re human problems. And we are going to fix them,” he added.

Initiatives launched during Clark’s tenure as Amazon’s operations chief included the company’s Delivery Service Partners network for last-mile package delivery; the Prime Air cargo fleet; and the Amazon Prime-branded tractor-trailers that are now ubiquitous on the nation’s highways.

But for all his experience in the industry, he’s a first-time founder.

“I’ve built a lot of things from scratch, but it’s my first company from scratch,” Clark said. “So it’s fun to go out and really take the best of all the cultures that I’ve been a part of, and what I’ve seen, and bring them together in one company.”

Clark resigned abruptly as CEO of Flexport in September 2023, a little more than year into the job, citing differences with the San Francisco-based freight and logistics company’s founder, Ryan Peterson. The circumstances and aftermath of his departure drew widespread attention at the time.

Ultimately, Clark concluded that it was “time to go build something new somewhere else.”

After that, he said, he decided to take the advice that many people gave him when he left Amazon, reconnecting with his family, and taking the time to think, reflect, and explore new ideas. He initially wasn’t planning to launch his own startup, but eventually came to the conclusion that it was the best approach.

“I really want to work with a team of people that I love working with, that share the same mission as me, that are masochistic about this incredible global problem, and are committed to doing whatever it takes to solve it,” he said.

Auger says its “founding team” is based in Bellevue, Wash., but Clark said he wasn’t yet ready to name others involved. The company was incorporated as Auger Inc. on Sept. 6, according to Delaware corporations records. Public records in Washington state and Delaware don’t yet provide any further clues as to who else is involved.

Clark, the company’s CEO and founder, said he expects Auger to grow to around 20 to 30 people within six months. Auger is currently looking for office space, and employees will be working in-person.

“I think, in a startup company, where you’re day one, and you have no history, and you have no culture, and you have no product yet that’s built, having the team together in a room to really riff and work together and make really fast changes and build together is really important,” he said.

Is this essentially what he was trying to build at Flexport? Not really, he said, citing the fact that Flexport was starting more from its perspective as a freight company.

However, he added, “Coming into Flexport, I did learn that it’s very hard to move a company whose culture and technology and entire ethos is really about making global trade easy, into a company that’s about enabling a technology platform, and a SaaS company. It’s just a bridge too far to make that work in that way.”

Clark connected with Oak HC/FT through a recruiter he knows well, who suggested that he talk with Annie Lamont, co-founder and managing partner; and Matt Streisfeld, general partner. He said he talked with a number of VC firms but kept coming back to Oak due to its long-term view and similar philosophy on building companies.

There are already some heavily funded supply chain technology companies taking on similar problems, including Project44 and FourKites, both based in Chicago, and Altana, based in Brooklyn, N.Y.

But Clark says there’s plenty of room to innovate.

“You’d be shocked how much of the world’s supply chain runs on Excel,” Clark said. “Excel is a lovely product, but it’s not intended to run the global supply chain. And so I spent a lot of the last year really thinking about, how could we solve this? This is really a solvable problem; this is not a physics problem. You don’t need to fundamentally reinvent the supply chain.”