Why We Invested in InstaLILY

‍Energize Capital is proud to lead the $60 million Series B investment in InstaLILY, the AI forward-deployed engineer built for the physical economy. Existing investor Insight Partners also joined the round, as well as new investors Home Depot Ventures and United Rentals. Energize principal Eileen Waris will join the InstaLILY board.

For companies powering the physical economy, the market has never been more complex. The millions of businesses scattered across distribution, construction, manufacturing, and field services are facing one of the biggest structural changes of the past thirty years: in 2025, U.S. energy demand hit a record 4.2 trillion kWh, wholesale trade sales rose by 4.8%, and construction spending topped $2.1 trillion. Simultaneously, upstream constraints hinder companies’ ability to meet demand. The manufacturing pool alone is expected to reach a deficit of 2.1 million unfilled jobs by 2030, while 82% of supply chain leaders reported disruptions from tariffs last year. In spaces already facing slim margins, these limitations mean that companies are leaving billions of dollars of revenue on the table.

As a result, demand for new technology and automation across construction and distribution sectors is booming. 94% of business leaders mark artificial intelligence as the greatest skill need for the next twelve months, but they struggle to implement tools; complex industry data structures, cost of implementation, and lack of AI expertise hinder effective deployment. In critical industries, risk tolerance is low and organizational knowledge is complex, siloed, and often undocumented. For software tools (let alone AI platforms) to succeed, they need to embed within knowledge networks, utilize context-aware logic, and demonstrate top-notch reliability and accuracy.

But without an immense amount of training, most existing tools fail to flow into existing workflows: ROI plummets and the growing cost of compute becomes prohibitive. To rectify this, many companies have begun to lean on AI experts like forward-deployed engineers (FDEs) to build and maintain custom implementations for their use cases. However, a tight FDE labor pool and lagging internal education mean that those experts are increasingly hard to come by. The result is an AI skill gap that the International Data Corporation estimates to cost up to $5.5T in product delays, quality problems, impaired competitiveness, and lost revenue.

‍Enter InstaLILY

InstaLILY is an AI platform built to help big corporations manage the complexity of supply chains, distribution, purchasing and more. Built alongside enterprise customers and trained on their intelligence, InstaLILY automates the functions that are the biggest bottlenecks for revenue operations: responding to RFQs, matching parts to orders, prioritizing pipelines, and beyond. Rather than using a general-purpose model that lacks industry context and understanding, InstaLILY offers a small language model (SLM) that is built directly on customer data from equipment documentation to pricing to Standard Operating Procedure documents (SOPs). The customer-owned model (called the “InstaBrain”) operates as a specialist from day one, then compounds its verticalized intelligence through reinforced learning from human feedback (RLHF), earning the right to embed directly into workflows and safely execute tasks. The solution also removes the need for dedicated AI experts like FDEs with the first-ever platform-agnostic agentic FDE, called LilyTM. Lily intelligently builds, maintains, and iterates upon AI workflows to optimize results and collapse time to value from months to days. This structure also significantly reduces resource pain-points; the SLM’s smaller surface area requires significantly less compute than generic models, dramatically reducing both cost and energy consumption.

Founded in 2023 in New York City, the company already serves some of the largest operators in construction, industrial distribution, logistics, and healthcare, including SRS/Home Depot, United Rentals, and Kedrion, and has seen 5x revenue growth in the past year. Recent projects include a collaboration with Google DeepMind to improve AI structures within vertical-specific settings and the launch of the Small Data Center with NVIDIA and Google to orchestrate compute across the cloud and localized edge infrastructure.

The Energize Angle

From our vantage point at the intersection of energy and industrial digitization, InstaLILY is a game-changer. The energy and industrial transitions hinge on physical assets, but manufacturing and construction costs are throttling these industries at the exact moment demand is at its highest. We see this platform as an exciting way to help an overburdened workforce stretch to meet the next chapter of a decarbonized economy.

Further, we know that deploying AI within complex industries is hard: these customers deserve specialist tools that can accelerate operations without adding risk or complication to the organization. We look for tools that respect the needs of these customers and embed themselves into workflows, offering long term solutions that can grow as the market evolves. With its agentic FDE capabilities, InstaLILY not only provides a solution today, but also a roadmap for dynamic digital transformation into the future.

Lastly, InstaLILY shows that AI deployment doesn’t have to be innately expensive and energy-consumptive; their small language and edge compute structures establish a new model for how companies can right-size their compute and energy demands to their applications.

The Team

InstaLILY was founded with a deep understanding of how enterprise customers think and operate. CEO Amit Shah founded the company after serving as President of 1-800-Flowers, where he helped lead one of the most recognizable consumer brands through a period of digital transformation, personalization, and scaled e-commerce growth, ultimately scaling from $200M to $3B through digital transformation and M&A. He serves on MIT’s Responsible AI panel along with leaders from United Nations, Mozilla, Mastercard, Stanford, Wharton, and more. Amit is joined by Co-Founder and COO Sumantro Das, who worked alongside him at 1-800-Flowers and whose role has been central to translating that insight into repeatable enterprise deployments. Together, they have built InstaLILY around a deeply customer-embedded model: start with the workflows that constrain revenue, learn the customer’s operating context, and deploy AI teammates that can execute inside existing systems.

Since founding, InstaLILY has grown into an international team spanning engineering, product, customer success, sales, and operations, with backgrounds across companies and institutions including Palantir, Meta, Google, Amazon, McKinsey, IBM, Insight Partners, Stanford, MIT, Princeton, Columbia, Brown, and the University of Chicago.

With this new capital infusion, InstaLILY plans to accelerate the development of Lily, expand deployment across new industries, scale global go-to-market efforts, and continue investing in the Small Data Center. Learn more and explore job openings here: https://instalily.ai