reporter steve taylor
Weslaco, Texas – William Steele, CEO and co-founder of Harva (formerly Supply Pay), explained how AI is improving business not only internally but also from a customer perspective.
The company specializes in supporting people in the production and distribution of fresh produce, and recently announced that it has raised $113 million to bring AI-native ERP and embedded finance to the global fresh produce market.
ERP stands for Enterprise Resource Planning. It is essentially a type of software that helps organizations manage and integrate core business processes such as finance, human resources, supply chain, and manufacturing all in one system. So instead of having separate tools for each department, everything is connected, making it easier to share data and streamline operations.
In-depth interview video interview RGG Business JournalSteele said Harva is becoming “an essential partner for all stakeholders involved in cross-border international trade.”
“One of the key areas we work with is distribution companies in the supply chain, so we started the company specifically to just provide financial solutions, but we quickly realized there was room to provide software infrastructure to help these companies operate more efficiently, and that’s where Harva was born,” Steele explained.
Asked to explain what Harva does, Steele said, “Harva is an AI-native ERP for these international fresh produce trading companies. What does this mean? This means the accounting system is integrated with the inventory management system, which is the same system that the team sells and procures, and all transactional documentation, purchase orders, bills of lading, sales invoices, purchase invoices, warehouse receipts, etc., all happen within the same system.
Steele continued, “So what does it mean to be AI-native? Well, it means we have agents built into the system that can do these things as an action system.”
He gave this example:
“You can just pick up your phone and say, ‘Create and send a purchase order to Ron’s Grapefruit Company for 1,500 cases of grapefruit at $22 a box.’ And we’ll actually create it in the system, queue it up step by step, and send Ron an email or a WhatsApp message. And then he can review it and send it. That’s something that traditionally took minutes from an administrative standpoint. That’s what we’re doing now.” AI This can be accomplished in a very short amount of time.
“From an accounting perspective, I can actually go to my customers and ask them, how much are my unpaid invoices from all my customers, how much is my unpaid amount? And about 15 to 16 Within seconds, that report is printed live, and then you can go ahead and ask questions like, “Hey, we’re going to prepare and send a collection email to all of our customers.” And we can do all of this in natural language, which has never been done before in this industry.”
When asked how AI has changed Harva, Steele said:
“Well, generally speaking, things have changed very dramatically over the last six months, both from an internal perspective and from what we call DevOps, and (in other words) how engineering teams are using AI to build products on a daily basis. This has fundamentally changed within the organization. Our teams can do more with less, so it’s been a very exciting time.”
“From a customer perspective, expectations and demands from customers have also changed. As AI is in the headlines and in the news and is being talked about everywhere, business owners are asking us. They hear about our AI-native systems and come to us. And they say, ‘How is this actually going to improve my business? That’s what we specialize in as an organization.’
“As CEO of the company, I am really excited to be involved in supporting such great engineering and product talent, as we find ourselves at the forefront of how we apply AI to our internal asset origination and asset management systems. How do we use AI in underwriting, underwriting risk, whether it’s fraud, whether it’s credit risk, whether it’s bankruptcy risk, all these different things?
“But in addition, as we build the product, all of this has fundamentally changed in the way we review shipping code. And I’m able to sit on the front lines of that with this team and figure out how to apply this in the most innovative ways that allow us to operate with high efficiency internally.” But in addition, we provide our customers with the same level of efficiency improvements natively within our products. So everything is changing even every week in terms of how we can improve internally and how that relates to product improvement for our clients and their businesses. ”
When asked why the company changed its name from Supply Pay to Harva, Steele Harva may stand for harvest or bountiful harvest. “Harva integrates both products that we built. Supply Pay was the first inception of the company. The problem we were solving (for our clients) with Supply Pay was a cash flow cycle problem. But now we also have Supply Log, an AI-native ERP that we built to help businesses become more efficient. So we integrated both of those systems and brought them all together in one. Running on one platform provided an opportunity to rebrand the company and allow one name to capture both the set of problems we solve for our clients.”
About Halva
Harva (formerly Supply Pay) exists to modernize the way fresh food companies operate and access capital. The company, based in South Texas’ Rio Grande Valley, provides fresh produce distributors with AI-native ERP and built-in invoice financing built specifically for the realities of fresh produce trading. Harva was founded by William Steele and George Ayala. For more information, please visit harva.ai.
