Look around the room you're in right now. The chair, the lightbulbs, even the specific bolts holding your desk together. All of it reached you because of a distributor.

Distribution is a €1.3 trillion market in Europe alone, $58 trillion globally. For comparison, wholesalers move every fifth dollar of the global product economy. Yet it's one of the most overlooked industries in the global economy.

But that combination - massive scale, low attention - creates exactly the kind of opportunity we look for at Cherry. The challenge is finding founders who deeply understand this world.

In 2021, we had a Cherry intern, Benedikt Nolte, who grew up around wholesale distribution. His grandfather founded one of Germany's first press distribution companies after World War II to support the right to free speech, which evolved into different industries run as a family business.

But Benedikt also talked about the dangers the industry faced. Many smaller distributors were struggling to keep up with technology and rapidly losing business because of it.

After returning to the family business and seeing these pressures close up, he decided to act. In 2023, Benedikt teamed up with Matthias Heinrich and Oliver Birch to build Plato - an AI native software to support the family business and the broader wholesale industry rather than see them get displaced.

The AI era let them approach the problem differently. Instead of building another layer on top of legacy Enterprise Resource Planning systems, they could rethink it from the ground up.

Where traditional ERPs store data, Plato’s AI reads transaction histories, inventory levels, customer behavior, and pricing rules, then predicts what's about to happen.

When a field sales rep logs into Plato before a customer visit, they see churn warnings for customers trending downward in specific product categories, opportunities like cross-sell recommendations, overdue quotes that need follow-up, or credit limit status. Plato's AI identifies these patterns across tens of thousands of data points that humans cannot see.

Because of this, sales reps now spend 70-80% of their day in Plato and often it's the only tool they need.

One rep called recently to say a customer claimed they had no current demand, but by mentioning the AI's cross-sell recommendations, he left with hundreds in additional sales. Revenue that would have been invisible in the old system. In a low-margin business, this is the difference between staying competitive and shutting up shop.The platform applies cutting-edge LLM technology to automate quoting and order creation directly inside the ERP. Incoming emails, PDFs, WhatsApp messages, or even handwritten notes are interpreted automatically. Quotes are generated in real time, and orders are executed end to end without manual intervention. The result is hours saved per employee every week and significantly faster deal cycles.

Beyond his family and even Germany, Benedikt knows Plato can be a global solution. The expansion economics have been built into the architecture, so once Plato handles sales workflows with bidirectional ERP access, adding customer service automation requires no new integration work. Further down the line, the same will apply to procurement modules, logistics, and finance workflows. Everything plugs into the same unified data model where the AI gets smarter with every transaction.Plato is building the AI operating system for that every fifth dollar.

This is a huge vertical and an example of AI-native software done right. Every new ERP mapping, product catalog, and sales workflow that runs through Plato makes the platform stickier. Delivering compounding value to customers already seeing measurable results.

Plato’s team also tackles one of the hardest problems in enterprise AI: adoption.

Many AI products fail in enterprise not because the technology is weak, but because they’re built by teams who’ve never lived the problem. Plato’s founding team combines deep industry knowledge with strong technical execution and operational experience, allowing them to navigate complex sales cycles. They know what distributors need because they’ve been on the other side.

We’ve known Benedikt since his time at Cherry. Watching him build the solution to a trillion-dollar problem he lived through is exactly the kind of founder conviction we look for. Last year we led Plato's first round and now we're doubling down today as part of their newly announced $14.5 million round.

Distribution might not be the flashiest industry, but it moves the world. And Plato is moving distribution.