Pillar raises $20M seed to automate commodity risk management

Pillar, a financial risk management platform for commodity-driven businesses, announced Tuesday that it has raised a $20 million seed funding round. The investment was led by venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, bringing the startup’s total funding to date to $23 million.

The seed round also included participation from:

• Crucible Capital
• Gallery Ventures
• Dara Khosrowshahi, the CEO of Uber

Founded in 2023 by CEO Harsha Ramesh and CTO Chinmay Deshpande, Pillar automates hedging—the practice of placing trades to offset or cancel out losses from other priced trades—for businesses dealing in commodities. The platform uses artificial intelligence to ingest and parse data from client contracts, cash flows, inventories, spreadsheets, WhatsApp messages, and enterprise resource planning (ERP) software. According to Ramesh, this allows the platform to continuously analyze exposure across commodities, foreign exchange (FX), and freight.

The platform then builds and manages a hedge portfolio, executing trades and monitoring risk. Ramesh stated that the system adjusts positions automatically based on market conditions, volatility, and the client’s risk tolerance, transforming hedging from a static, periodic decision to a continuous, autonomous system. The startup’s current clients include Shibuya Sakura Industries, a trading firm that buys and sells commodities like metals; recyclable materials company Sigma Recycling; and United Metal Solutions Group, which also recycles and trades metals.

Ramesh, a former macro trader, also spent time working at a medium-sized physical import-export business. “What stood out was that sophisticated institutions had access to tools, infrastructure, and talent, while the actual producers, importers, and manufacturers driving global trade had little to no access to this,” said Ramesh, the co-founder and CEO of Pillar. He added that risk management was often treated as a luxury despite being essential, and the company’s goal is to make hedging as accessible and ubiquitous as payments or accounting software for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).

While the platform automates execution, Ramesh clarified that humans remain in the loop. Human operators handle approvals, oversight, and strategic decisions, and provide judgment alongside machine execution during complex situations, such as large transactions.

Why it matters

Pillar aims to democratize access to sophisticated, institutional-grade risk management tools for small and medium-sized enterprises, which the company claims have historically lacked access to such infrastructure.