The New Operating System for Business: Our Investment in Doss

We are entering the next era of systems of record. Software titans like Oracle and SAP were built around on-premise software, and maintained dominance as those products were shifted over to the cloud. These platforms have not kept up with the capability and flexibility of modern developer-oriented software. But for decades, high switching costs prevented customers from churning.

This changes with AI, which will be transformative in every business function. Companies must adopt AI to survive, and to do so effectively, they will have to transition to modern platforms. For the first time in a generation, challengers will have a chance to compete in the largest software categories in the world.

Doss is built around this premise to disrupt the Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) market – the core operating system for any business tracking inputs, processes, and outputs. Today’s ERPs are not powerful or flexible enough for the needs of modern businesses, or the right platform for AI-powered automations that are transforming operations. Doss is transforming the category with a composable software platform and data layer that can be configured and modified with near-zero cost and time. We are thrilled to partner with Wiley Jones, Arnav Mishra, and the Doss team to lead their Series A.

It’s hard to make your operating system fit your operating model

For such a core piece of software, ERPs are notoriously challenging to buy and manage. The ~$100 billion annual software cost is matched or exceeded by professional services spend. A typical ERP implementation takes no less than 6 months, and can run to 3+ years. And despite paying for implementation services and dedicating internal resources, a majority of ERP implementations fail entirely. This destroys ROI and damages the teams that procured it. Any sizable company typically has multiple ERP instances, because it’s just too much effort and too risky to consolidate them into one.

It’s not the ERP providers’ fault; this is a truly hard problem to solve. Every type of business works differently – they might have different manufacturing/distribution processes, business models, vendor relationships, or billing processes. Even two companies in the same industry can make different operating decisions.

ERPs must be conformed to a customer’s business, and doing so in today’s legacy platforms requires a huge amount of custom code and third-party software. This is the root cause of ERP’s woes. Custom code is more expensive to build, more expensive to modify, and brittle to any changes – implementation is challenging and upgrades/changes are usually not worth the effort.

Doss is new way to build complex enterprise software

Enter Doss: an adaptive ERP and data platform that can be easily configured and modified for any business workflow. Doss is built on a foundation of composable primitives – data, business logic, and user interface (UI) components – that can be assembled into arbitrary applications.

The guiding principle for the platform is configurability. While other ERPs might allow a customer to modify a UI or report, Doss makes it possible to change the data model, business logic, and application, all within the Doss framework and not requiring third-party code.

The differences for their dozens of customers – from food & beverage, to apparel, to construction – is dramatic. Implementations that would have taken a year can be completed in days to weeks. Business leaders can change their workflows or build new applications without fear of tech debt and ballooning implementation costs.

And the unified data platform makes it simple to implement powerful AI automations across any function, from inventory and order management to billing workflows. AI will also further accelerate platform implementation, as Doss’ AI models can generate configurations from natural language requests.

It is immensely easier to just build one product, versus building flexible components so a customer can assemble any product they want. Doing so in the ERP space, the most complex software product of all, is even harder. Wiley and Arnav have assembled an elite team with the technical genius, customer obsession, and determination verging on craziness to take on this challenge. If you’re looking for a 10/10 hard problem to work on, Doss is the place to go.

We are thrilled to join Doss on their journey to transform the ERP market and set a new standard for modern systems of record. To join this one-in-a-generation company, check out their open roles here.