As we’ve noted frequently from the beginning of Construct, moments of industrial transition can create once in a generation opportunity for long term behavioral change. One of the largest sectors undergoing this monumental shift is our supply chain, and more specifically the day-to-day operations of how our supply chains run.
We’re excited to announce that we have led the $6M Seed round of BackOps, a company we believe will be defining the future of the supply chain.
The Hidden Cost of Exceptions
At its core, BackOps is the singular intelligence layer for 3PL, manufacturing, and logistics back office work, tying together disparate systems of record and communication layers through voice and text. However, the company began as an effort to solve a problem Co-founder and CEO Sean McCarthy experienced first hand pitching brands on Amazon’s logistics capabilities — exception management.
One misplaced pallet can unleash an exhausting chain of phone calls, emails, portal log‑ins, and spreadsheet edits. Operators bounce between Warehouse Management Systems (WMS), Transportation Management Systems (TMS), Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) tools, texts, chat apps, and phone calls just to figure out what went wrong, let alone fix it. This manual effort shows up as overtime costs, vendor fines, reduced throughput, and unhappy customers. Less visible, but just as damaging, is the opportunity cost that piles up when skilled staff spend their days copy‑pasting tracking numbers instead of improving processes. More than 10% of high‑volume shipments arrive with errors, each one triggering a multi‑step fire drill across disconnected systems.
Consider the ripple effect: every day that an exception remains unresolved ends up tying up inventory, delaying billing, and eroding service‑level credibility. Multiply that by thousands of shipments a week and the hidden tax on working capital becomes enormous. For operators already battling slim margins and tight labor markets, exception fatigue is more than a nuisance, it’s an existential drag on competitiveness.
From Exception to Solution
Today, BackOps steps in to handle the entire process end to end. Their first product, Relay, listens to calls, manages tickets, emails, and chats, spots the core issue, pulls the right data from connected systems, and carries out the fix, whether that means filing a claim, starting a reshipment, or updating inventory. All at once, BackOps can handle the inbound conversations, while following up with carriers, suppliers, and internal teams.
In practice, Relay shortens follow‑ups, cuts cycle times, and increases the overall throughput and capacity of its customers.
This is only one of many workflows BackOps handles end to end for its customers today, and there will be many more in the near future.
Why This Matters Now
For years, supply chain software focused on Systems of Record that kept each function in its own silo. The few large scale supply chain software providers are products of these silos, largely operating part and parcel with onerous service implementations. Despite the best effort of the SaaS wave, next-gen systems of record have failed to achieve similar scale of the legacy players.
This is due to the simple fact that in supply chain, the largest value is not created through the structuring of the internal data of each node. Instead, it is created by the rapid exchange of information between each node in the chain. More specifically, the most important data in a supply chain is often created and transmitted in near real time in reaction to changes on the ground (e.g. an incorrect delivery).
This means that true value in a supply chain exists in the connection between systems of record and the unstructured data in systems of communication.
It is only now that the supply chain communication layer could exist, and BackOps is meeting the needs of the industry.
A Team of Operators
At Construct, we back founders who have lived the problems they’re solving. When we met CEO Sean McCarthy, it was abundantly clear that he had spent time battling exception queues. Sean deeply understands warehouse operations and procurement, and most importantly has been his own customer. Co-founder Henry Ou, not only managed applied ML teams at ByteDance and Apple, but also ran his own ERP integration business, deeply embedding himself in the workflows and systems BackOps services today.
Sean and Henry are a rare blend of lived operational and technical experience, and we’re excited, alongside previous investors Gradient and 10vc, to help scale the vision from claims to full‑stack orchestration, transforming today’s reactive scramble into tomorrow’s self‑healing network.
Most importantly, BackOps is hiring. If you’re interested in building AI applications that impact the physical world, reach out!