I have recently invested in a follow on round for Supplai.ai (*), a company using ai for cold chain logistics. I interviewed Azmi Negro, its CEO and Founder.
What problem(s) are you solving?
In Saudi Arabia’s cold chain, the market is structurally misaligned: roughly 70% of refrigerated capacity sits with hundreds of small SME logistics providers, while almost all enterprise demand flows to the few larger players that control only about 30% of the assets. This leaves enterprises constantly constrained on capacity and flexibility, while SMEs with perfectly good trucks sit underutilized and fight for crumbs.
Supplai exists to bridge that gap: we plug enterprise demand directly into this fragmented SME base through a single, high‑reliability, tech‑enabled layer, so that shippers get consistent service and SMEs get real volume instead of one‑off spot jobs.
On top of that, we solve for speed, transparency, and paperwork: we offer the fastest per‑pallet cold‑chain shipping in the market, a fully digital experience instead of WhatsApps and phone calls, live order visibility, and instant proof of delivery instead of waiting a week for physical documents.
What prompted you to launch?
Before Supplai, I co‑founded and operated a burger‑buns factory in the Eastern Province, distributing into almost 18 cities with a product that had an average shelf life of just five days. Every time we tried to expand into smaller or more remote cities, we ran into the same wall: you start with one or two clients in a new city, not twenty, yet you still need to send a truck, wait days for a full load, and then bring it back empty – which killed our margins and put a hard cap on how far we could grow.
At the same time, short‑shelf‑life products like ours had no fast, reliable per‑pallet cold‑chain option; shipments could take anywhere from three to eight business days, which simply did not work. When diesel subsidies started to unwind after the Aramco IPO, and we saw trip prices rising over 200% in just a few years, it became obvious that the existing model was structurally broken – that combination of geographic reality, inefficiency, and rising fuel costs is what pushed me to step out, build Supplai, and tackle the cold-chain bottleneck directly instead of just living with it as a manufacturer.
What is immediately next for your company?
Immediately, we’re doubling down on two fronts: operational AI agents and enterprise expansion. On the AI side, we’ve already embedded agentic systems inside our operations, admin, and back office – they now act as “digital team members” that learn from every shipment, every quote, and every exception, and then help our people route loads more profitably and faster, assemble documents, update statuses, and even quote and re‑quote clients based on live carrier economics.
Over the next 24–48 months, we want Supplai to be the reference point for AI‑driven B2B logistics in Saudi: a company where agents talk to agents, but everything still maps tightly to what’s happening on the ground, truck by truck and pallet by pallet. In parallel, we are advancing conversations with some of the largest F&B manufacturers, traders, and platforms in the Kingdom; we already serve a major enterprise client base and are in final stages with Noon, which, once live, will make 2026 as explosive as 2025 in terms of volume and relevance in the ecosystem.
Which are / will be your products?
Today, our core “product” is a one‑stop cold‑chain logistics layer: a single relationship that gives enterprises access to anything from 1.5‑ton vans to 8‑ton lorries and trailers, across Saudi, with the fastest per‑pallet shipping in the market. Practically, that means our customers can stop juggling multiple carriers for different routes and truck sizes; they place their shipments through our digital platform, we assign the optimal carrier from our SME network, we orchestrate the move end‑to‑end, and they track everything live.
Around that core service, we’re layering digital products: instant digital airway bills, live status updates, AI‑enabled driver cameras that push proof of delivery immediately, and a platform that’s designed to become increasingly “agent‑first” over time.
Looking ahead, many of these capabilities – especially the agentic tools that optimize routing, capacity, and pricing – can evolve into standalone software products or subscription layers, but we’re deliberately grounding them in a very real, very operational business first.
What is your business model?
Even though everything runs through our platform, we fundamentally operate today as an asset‑light logistics company with a transaction‑based business model. We charge clients per trip, pay our SME carrier partners per trip, and keep a margin in between – that’s our take rate, and it already covers a meaningful share of our total cost base despite our age and growth rate.
The “SaaS” aspect is that all stakeholders – enterprises, our internal ops champions, and carriers – live on a single digital platform where orders are created, assigned, tracked, and settled; that gives us high stickiness and deep operational data, which is exactly what our AI agents need to keep improving.
Over time, we see a clear path to adding subscription‑style revenue for advanced capabilities, but we are intentionally building a business that can stand on healthy unit economics and cost control, not just on software licenses detached from the physical work on the ground.
What’s your current greatest challenge?
In the short term, one of our biggest challenges is capital‑markets related rather than operational: closing the right VC partner in a region where many funds have temporarily stepped back to “wait out” macro and geopolitical uncertainty before deploying new capital. We’ve had serious conversations that paused not because of Supplai’s fundamentals, but because of internal fund dynamics and a general slowdown in signing new SAFEs – which forces us to decide whether we complete this round fully with angels and strategic investors or wait for a VC to lean in.
In parallel, we’ve been actively navigatingcrisis‑driven supply shocks in Jeddah, where trailer capacity has been sucked into cross‑border routes paying 4–6x more, and into Hajj‑related food movements, which pushed local prices up 50–80% and made domestic supply highly volatile. Our response has been to rapidly expand our carrier base and structurally secure both inbound and outbound legs for Jeddah, but managing that volatility while fundraising in a cautious market is, realistically, the hardest part of the next 90 days.
Are you satisfied with your rate of progress?
Overall, yes – especially looking at the arc rather than a single quarter. In 2025 we grew around 25% month‑on‑month for the full year, which is well above what I had initially modeled when we launched, and we did that while building the platform, the network, and the team from scratch. I was less satisfied with Q1 2026, where growth dipped to around 10% versus Q4, largely because we’re heavily exposed to the HoReCa segment and Ramadan/Eid are structurally softer for that customer base.
That said, as we speak, sales are “blasting off” again, our operational efficiency per ops champion has improved by an order of magnitude, and we have a clear, disciplined path to profitability as we scale – so yes, I’m happy with where we are, and equally hungry about where we still need to go.
——
Quote
(*) I am an early investor in Supplai.ai