Infuriatingly, the new StockBot-3000 kept buying oil at the top. Pic: Getty Images

If the devil wears Prada, Prada relies on a Sydney-based tech firm to ensure its luxury handbags and shoes are shipped effortlessly across the globe, ensuring the only drama is in its warehouses.

That firm, Fluent Commerce, has secured $46m from Bain Capital to accelerate its push to become the ‘AI powerhouse’ for the world’s biggest brands as large language models such as ChatGPT and Claude threaten to upend retail forever with ‘one-click shopping’.

The new funding represents a significant vote of confidence in the niche but critical market of order management systems — a piece of software that tracks a customer’s order from the moment they click “buy” until the package is delivered.

Fluent Commerce, a global provider of this essential logistics backbone, will use the capital to support continued international growth and heavily invest in new, AI-powered capabilities for its platform.

“Our goal is to serve our customers with real-time data to enable them to remove profit leaks and to grow,” said CEO Graham Jackson. “This investment from Bain Capital enables us to supercharge our international growth and become the AI powerhouse for global brands.”

Fluent Commerce’s customers include Prada Group, L’Oreal, Kingfisher, LVMH, and JD Sports. Its distributed OMS is designed to optimise and move inventory faster and more accurately.

Bain’s investment is less a bet on incremental change and more a strategic response to the predicted rise of agentic commerce, a term dominating recent industry conferences, like the National Retail Federation show in New York. This new channel involves personal AI assistants, such as advanced versions of Gemini or ChatGPT, doing the shopping for consumers autonomously or just in ‘one click’. For retailers, the shift changes the nature of competition.

Mr Jackson said that in this new environment, the traditional power of marketing and brand awareness becomes “way less relevant”. Instead, two factors become paramount: “accurate, real time, inventory availability” and ensuring “product information needs to be bang on”.

The stakes for getting these technical details wrong are now dramatically higher. An error made on a brand’s website might result in one disappointed customer, creating a small “blast radius”.

But Mr Jackson said an error communicated to an AI shopping agent — inaccurate stock, an optimistic delivery time, or a false product description — can have a “massive blast radius”. That agent “now knows that you’re not trustworthy … it stops putting you in its list of recommended places to go shopping”.

Fluent Commerce is channelling the Bain capital toward solutions for this new reality. A core area of expansion is its new AI-powered platform, ‘Fluent Connect’, which uses proprietary tools to write and maintain integration code between the OMS and critical third-party systems, cutting the time to deploy connections with payment gateways and carriers from weeks to a matter of hours.

Furthermore, the company is injecting predictive AI into its core fulfilment optimisation, or “sourcing logic.” This AI monitors existing rules, finds ways to improve order fulfilment — for instance, by suggesting a more profitable shipping location — and offers these suggestions to a business user as an A/B test opportunity. This allows brands to safely test AI-driven hypotheses on a small percentage of orders before rolling out the change company-wide.

Fluent Commerce is one of only three companies that major analyst firms consider leaders in order management and inventory availability, going “toe to toe” with much larger, established monoliths like Manhattan Associates.

With more than 80 per cent of its revenue already coming from outside Australia, the capital will specifically fuel an aggressive expansion in North America, a key market where Mr Jackson said the company is not yet ranked number one but has “no reason why (it) shouldn’t be”.

For Bain Capital, a global private capital firm with more than $US215bn in assets under management, the transaction aligns with its strategy of supporting high-growth technology companies.

“We are excited to partner with Fluent Commerce as it accelerates its global expansion,” said Paul Kennedy, partner at Bain Capital.

“Fluent has built a best-in-class commerce platform guided by a proven management team, a focused customer-first strategy, and technology leadership that has earned the trust of leading global brands. Bain Capital’s conviction in Fluent is grounded in our global technology investing experience, which we will continue to apply as we support the company’s ongoing growth.”

The deal was advised by Neu Capital. “Fluent Commerce is a fantastic Australian success story. It’s been a pleasure arranging this capital as they continue to expand worldwide,” said Neu Capital managing director Cyrus Church.

This article first appeared in The Australian as Prada and LVMH’s tech partner Fluent Commerce lands $46m for global AI push