WESLACO, Texas - William Steele, CEO and co-founder of Harva (formerly Supply Pay) has explained how AI is improving his business, not only internally but also from a customer’s perspective.
The company specializes in helping those involved in producing and distributing of perishable goods and recently announced it had raised $113 million to bring AI-native ERP and embedded finance to the international perishables market.
ERP stands for Enterprise Resource Planning. It's basically a type of software that helps organizations manage and integrate their core business processes—things like finance, HR, supply chain, manufacturing, and so forth—all in one system. So, instead of having separate tools for each department, everything’s connected, making it easier to share data and streamline operations.
In an in-depth interview video interview with the RGG Business Journal, Steele said Harva is becoming an “indispensable partner to every stakeholder involved in a cross-border, international transaction.”
Steele explained: “One of the main areas of focus that we are working on is in the distribution companies within the supply chain. So, we specifically started the company off just providing the financial solutions, but we quickly realized that there was room to provide software infrastructure for these companies to run more operationally efficient. So, what was born out of that is Harva.”
Asked to explain the work of Harva, Steele said: “Harva is an AI-native ERP for these international perishable good trading companies. What does that mean? This means that your accounting system is all in one with your inventory management system. It's the same system that your team sells and procures on, all of the documents regarding trade, purchase orders, bills of lading, sales invoices, purchase invoices, warehouse receipts, all of that is done in the same system.”
Steele continued: “And what does it mean to be AI-native? Well, it means that we have built in agents to the system that can conduct these as a system of action.”
He gave this example:
“I can take my phone and say, hey, create a purchase order (and send) to Ron's grapefruit company for 1,500 cases of grapefruit at $22 a box. And it will actually create that in the system for you, queue it up in stages to send an email or a WhatsApp message to Ron. And then you can review it and send it off, something that would have taken, historically, many minutes of time to do from an administrative perspective. It is now being done by AI in a fraction of the time.
“From an accounting perspective, you can go in and actually ask it, hey, what are all of my invoices outstanding from all of my customers, how much money is outstanding to me? And within about 15 to 16 seconds, it will print out that report live, and then you can proceed with asking it, hey, prep collections emails for all of them and send those out. And you can do all of this in natural language, in a way that has never been done historically in this industry.”
Asked how AI has changed Harva, Steele said:
“Well, in general, the landscape has shifted quite drastically over the last six months. This is both from an internal perspective, in terms of DevOps, which is what we call it, (in other words) how our engineering team uses AI in their day-to-day building of the product. That has radically shifted internally in our organization. It's been a very exciting time, because our team can do so much more with less.
“From a customer perspective, it's also made the expectations and the demand from the customer shift. Because AI is in the headlines, it is in the news, it is all over the place, business owners are asking us… they’re coming to us because they hear about our AI-native system, and they're saying, hey, what can you do? How does this actually improve my business, and that's what we specialize in as an organization?
“I've been really pleased as the CEO of the company, to serve around such great engineering talent and product talent, because we're finding at the very frontier, how do we apply AI in our own internal asset origination, asset management system? How do we use it in underwriting, in underwriting risk, whether that's fraud or credit risk, insolvency risk, all of these different things? We’re finding big efficiency gains in the financing process of our company.
“But, additionally, as we build out products, even in how we review code as we ship it out, all of these things have fundamentally changed, and I get to sit at the frontier of that with this team and uncover how we apply this in the most innovative of ways, so that our company internally is operating at high efficiency. But additionally we're providing that same level of efficiency gain to our customers native within the product. So all of this is changing even on a weekly basis, in terms of how we can improve internally, and how that correlates to product improvement for our clients and their businesses.”
Asked why the company changed its name from Supply Pay to Harva, Steele Harva could be short for harvest or bountiful harvest. But also, “Harva brings together both of the products that we had built: Supply Pay, which was the initial founding of the company. The problem we (sought to fix for the client) with Supply Pay was cash flow cycle issues. But we also now have Supply Log, which is the AI-native ERP that we built to help businesses run more efficiently. So by bringing both of those systems together and having all of this happen on one platform, it presented an opportunity to rebrand and position the company so that that single name would capture both of those problem sets that we solve for our clients.”
Harva (formerly Supply Pay) exists to modernize how perishable goods companies run their operations and access capital. Based in the Rio Grande Valley of South Texas, the company serves fresh produce distributors with an AI-native ERP and embedded invoice financing built specifically for the realities of the perishable goods trade. Harva was founded by William Steele and George Ayala. For more information go to harva.ai
