Korso

Competitive Intelligence & Product Roadmap

AI agents that execute manufacturing back-office workflows.

Company Overview

Korso is an AI operations platform that runs manufacturing workflows across ERP, CRM, email, and documents. It serves manufacturers, distributors, procurement teams, and customer service teams; public customers are not named.

Latest Intel

Zeitgeist tracks private signals to determine where the company is heading strategically.

May 18, 2026

Product Surface Signal

Confidence:

Medium

New Intel: Korso is positioning Atlas and Hermes as an agent layer over legacy manufacturing ERP. That opens a wedge against iPaaS and RPA by targeting quote, purchase order, and supplier coordination work.

What They're Building

The company's public product roadmap & what they're committed to building.

Atlas workflow agents

Atlas runs quoting, purchase order tracking, supplier follow-up, delay coordination, and customer updates across manufacturing teams.

Hermes context layer

Hermes maps ERP, CRM, finance, warehouse, commerce, calendar, and communication systems so agents can act with business context.

RFQ and document extraction

The product reads RFQs, quotes, POs, invoices, contracts, specs, and email attachments to feed structured work into Atlas.

Verification and audit controls

Korso adds scoped tool access, dry runs, approvals, audit trails, and human escalation before high-risk ERP actions.

Founder and Key Execs

Daichi Hiraoka

Co-Founder (listed by Y Combinator as an active founder)

Alex Liu

Co-Founder (listed by Y Combinator as an active founder)

Martin Pan

Co-Founder (former General Motors automation engineer, Mechanical Engineering and Robotics at Penn)

Founder Force Multiplier

Martin Pan’s GM automation background gives the team direct manufacturing workflow exposure. The founding team has also described direct client discovery with Asian manufacturers, which fits Korso’s ERP-over-replacement thesis.

Funding History

2026 | Listed as a Y Combinator Spring 2026/P26 company backed by Y Combinator

Competitors

Smartbase:

YC Spring 2026 company focused on automating purchase order entry for manufacturers, a narrower wedge than Korso’s broader workflow-agent layer.

Arzana:

YC P26 company described as AI automation for the manufacturing office, with likely overlap around inside sales and quoting workflows.

Workato:

Integration automation platform that connects business systems, while Korso is manufacturing-specific and centered on agentic execution.

UiPath:

RPA platform for automating repetitive enterprise tasks, while Korso’s product is tuned to manufacturing ERP context and approvals.

Korso

's Moat:

Workflow switching costs are the likely path: Hermes can become hard to replace if it captures each manufacturer’s ERP quirks, approval rules, and operating history.

How They're Leveraging AI

ERP-grounded manufacturing agents

Korso uses AI agents to run manufacturing back-office workflows such as RFQ handling, quote follow-up, purchase order tracking, supplier ETA chasing, and customer updates. The user is the operations, procurement, customer service, or sales team stuck between ERP, CRM, email, and supplier communication.

Document extraction for RFQs and POs

Korso applies AI to extract structured information from RFQs, quotes, purchase orders, invoices, contracts, specs, and email attachments. The output feeds quote creation, pricing lookup, approval routing, and order workflows.

Tenant-specific operating memory

Korso appears to build a customer-specific knowledge layer over each manufacturer’s ERP quirks, pricing rules, approval paths, supplier behavior, and communication history. That memory can make future agent actions more accurate inside the same account.

AI Use Overview:

Korso pairs LLM agents with Hermes, a mapped context layer over ERP, CRM, email, and documents, so models can read records, validate actions, and write back with approvals.

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