In over two decades at Amazon , Dave Clark oversaw the transformation of the online retailer into a shipping and delivery giant, before rising to the No. 2 executive role alongside founder Jeff Bezos and eventually Bezos’s successor, Andy Jassy.
Now Clark is channeling that lifetime of experience, plus learnings from a brief, turbulent stint atop supply-chain startup Flexport , to bet on himself.
Clark founded a new AI-powered supply-chain startup called Auger this summer, and has raised $100 million in Series A funding entirely from the investment firm Oak HC/FT, he told Fortune in an interview on Monday. Clark’s aim is to help midsize enterprises with global supply chains—think the Fortune 500 outside of the top 50—integrate various supply-chain systems, and their data, from different providers into a single operating system that looks more like a consumer app than a clunky enterprise solution.
“The software doesn’t really talk to each other; a friend of mine calls it Franken software,” Clark says of traditional supply-chain systems. “The pieces all come together but don’t [work] together, and so people end up setting up teams of analysts with Excel. A shocking amount of the world’s supply chain actually runs on Excel.”
With Auger, Clark aims to let business users get real-time answers to pressing questions around shipments, forecasting, and other critical areas through simple text queries. Such visibility should help increase a supply chain’s efficiency while lowering costs, Clark believes.
“How do we allow companies to run their supply chains with the same level of simplicity and elegance as the consumer applications that they use every day?” Clark asked rhetorically. “The technology totally exists to do that, and I think it just hasn’t been put together.”
Clark says the sweet spot for an Auger customer will be companies that have global supply chains but aren’t so large as to employ massive in-house technology divisions. The startup will likely focus its efforts on U.S.-based companies initially, but hopes to eventually expand beyond that including into the government and defense spaces.
Clark moved back to Washington State from Texas to launch Auger, which is headquartered in Bellevue. The startup plans to grow to 30 to 40 employees in the next six months, according to a spokesperson. Auger hasn’t yet released a product nor has Clark decided which AI model or models the startup would use.
Clark spent 23 years at Amazon, retiring from the company in 2022 as CEO of its global consumer business, where he reported to Amazon CEO Bezos and later to his successor, Jassy. Clark spent almost a decade of his time at Amazon in roles more or less equivalent to a chief supply-chain officer, launching and scaling Amazon’s last-mile delivery network and laying the foundation for a new regional warehouse structure that the company says has helped increase shipping speeds.
Clark left Amazon for the CEO job at freight software startup Flexport, in part owing to friction with Jassy, his new boss. But Clark spent just a year at the startup before Flexport founder Ryan Petersen pushed him and his deputies out in a dramatic, befuddling move.
Clark, who says he hasn’t spoken to Petersen or Jassy anytime recently, had reportedly been considering a run for Texas governor in 2026. But he tells Fortune that he had decided not to throw his hat in the ring after Gov. Greg Abbott announced earlier this year that he intended to run for reelection. “He’s a great governor,” Clark says of Abbott, though he notes that he hopes to eventually get into politics, in part because of his disillusionment with career politicians.
“Much of the problems we talk about today, whether immigration or anything else, are highly solvable problems that rational people on both sides share probably 80% or 90% of the same objectives and cannot get the ball across the line because it’s just too good politically for their careers to fight,” he says. “I think if you have a world where politicians … that’s not their career … you have a higher probability of solving some of these intractable issues that linger and create lots of dysfunction in the world.”
As for the impetus behind Auger, Clark says he had visions of tackling a similar problem at Flexport.
“I went to Flexport with this idea that we could build the same kind of things we built at Amazon but for other businesses,” Clark notes. “And that was kind of the intent when I went there, but we ended up not aligned on the mission in the same way.”
Now he gets a second chance. With a $100 million war chest behind him.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
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