Almost three years ago my soon-to-be cofounder and I were excitedly gesturing over a rickety hightop tucked in the back of a popular SOMA brewery. We were meeting in person for the first time, less than 100 feet from what would be the first office of a company we hadn’t started yet.

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“How do you speed-run 50 years of ERP software?”

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I asked, leaning over the table, staring down my pale ale.

Arnav (my co-founder) slowly nodded his head, eyes wide.

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We laid out a decade-long vision for the company before we finished our drinks.

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The ERP incumbents are the “sleeping giants” of the tech sector. SAP is about to celebrate its 53rd anniversary this April. Almost all other market leaders were founded before I was born. The solution landscape is filled with what are undeniably great companies – but, categorically, they’ve destroyed the goodwill of their customer base.

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You see, despite being one of the largest software markets ($100B+ and still growing), ERP has a controversial scorecard. Between Gartner, McKinsey, and the vendors themselves, ERP implementation failure rate is estimated to be anywhere between 55-75% and typical projects last 12-18 months.

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What’s more, almost all of the companies that implemented these solutions believe the projects failed to achieve the ROI outlined during the pre-sales process. Just this year the international grocery chain Spar Group Ltd. made waves when it reported losing $107M as a result of a failed ERP installation.

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Anyone who’s led ERP projects knows that it can either make or break a career and the odds are not favorable. So the question we were left with was, what could we do about it?

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Honestly, after years of using these systems I didn’t think there was a fix — and I wasn't alone. Decades ago, Larry Ellison (the founder of Oracle) said one of his biographies:

"Seamless and automated systems integration is beyond state-of-the-art."

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Real Magic

But then, in 2022, something incredible happened. I scrolled across a ten-second video so magical that I had to rewatch it to make sure it was real. Someone was using GPT to few-shot SQL queries on a database containing NBA player stats by just describing them in plain English. I felt like I had been struck by a bolt of lightning.

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The future was crystal clear: end-business users would no longer need mastery of syntax to have mastery of semantics. They’d be able to build nuanced applications with just their words.

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A `window of opportunity was opening. One that had been closed since that last platform shift into cloud: ERP incumbents were vulnerable. It would be possible to build a platform that was orders of magnitude faster to install, cheaper to own, and easier to use.

But achieving this was fundamentally impossible on legacy ERP architectures. Arnav and I quit our jobs, founded Doss, and began an 18 month speed-run of 50 years of software.

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Built for the Real World

We reimagined app-layer ergonomics, designing for humans and LLM-agents alike. We enabled schemas to be adaptive and modeled around your actual business process. We even went as far as creating an in-house hybrid database that can scale to hundreds of millions of records on a single instance.

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The result is DossARP (Adaptive Resource Platform). The most powerful software platform ever built for the Real World. Leverage the strengths of your existing ERP, fill in critical gaps, or replace it entirely.

As a company, we're in the business of building elegant abstractions and selling reform. Our implementation process is about putting a mirror in front of our customers–so they can see themselves as they truly are. The magic is modeling software around their actual business process, right in front of them, in real-time.

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It forces people to consider an alternate reality: maybe ERPs don’t need to take years to implement. Maybe there’s a better way.

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Doss is the Enterprise Unleashed

Today, our customers are replacing industry-leading products with Doss.

• A peanut butter company is using Doss to supply Barry’s Bootcamp fitness studios.
• A construction company is using Doss to manufacture the glass conference rooms of Manhattan commercial spaces.
• A private equity firm is rolling Doss out across their portfolio to improve reporting and automation.

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The best part? We’re just getting started.

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We’ve partnered with Tomasz Tunguz at Theory Ventures for a $18M Series A fundraise to continue in our mission of accelerating the global value chain.

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This year:

1. We’re going to ship the world’s first E2E AI-configured ERP.
2. DossARP customers will all get a copilot designed for “Real World” jobs.
3. Enterprise customers will leverage DossARP as app platform, iPaaS solution, and data warehouse.
4. We’ll be recruiting even more world-class builders to join our sales, engineering, and product teams.

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Whether you’re in the market for a solution or are interested in joining our team, we’d love to hear from you. Feel reach out to me directly at wiley@doss.com or check out our open roles here.

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