In the $25T commodity industry that fuels our global economy, critical decisions and execution still rely on costly overheads, fragmented documents, and manual reconciliation across all departments.
Every physical trade or movement involves a complex support system of operations, compliance, legal, finance, claims, and more. These workflows are heavily dependant on email as their source of truth and use dozens of disconnected systems requiring hefty manual input. Currently, these functions are a cost centre that scales linearly with volume, limiting the potential for growth in commodity businesses.
We believe there is an opportunity to streamline these complex systems across the entire value chain. This is why we are excited to back Doczen and their mission to reconfigure how physical commodity companies operate in the age of AI.
Doczen was born from founder Daniel Volkenstein’s firsthand experience of working across multiple departments at Glencore, one of the world’s largest commodity trading companies. This unique experience gave Daniel an inside view into how the industry’s largest players run their operations at scale: the resources, systems, and coordination required to keep the organisation moving. That experience became the blueprint for building a product that delivers those same capabilities to firms of any size.
Together with his co-founder, Martijn Verbove, they have built a stellar team around Doczen — a group of engineers, operators, and industry specialists drawn directly from the worlds of commodities, physical operations, and AI. This combination of deep domain knowledge and engineering talent uniquely positions the company to execute on its mission: Rebuilding the modern commodity organisation from the ground up with AI at its core.
On why we partnered with Doczen from Day One, our Partner Sia Houchangnia comments:
“We are excited to lead Doczen’s first funding round to fuel their mission to reconfigure how the commodity industry operates in the age of AI. This is a massive, critical sector that has seen limited innovation for decades, and we believe the time is right for a step-change. Daniel and Martijn are the right founders for this moment – complementary in their strengths, grounded in real industry experience, and supported by a strong technical team.”
We are excited to lead Doczen’s round, joined by our friends Rerail, Anamcara, Nordstar, Indicator Fund and strategic investors from the commodities and tech industries (ex-Glencore, Shell, Robinhood, and Thiel Macro).
Doczen is actively hiring! Join their growing team of engineers who want to build at the intersection of AI and real-world operations.
For more information, visit doczen.com.