Financial risk platform Pillar secures $20M seed funding led by a16z

Pillar, a platform focused on helping commodity-driven businesses manage financial risk, announced on Tuesday that it has secured $20 million in seed funding led by Andreessen Horowitz.

Other participants in the funding round include Crucible Capital, Gallery Ventures, and Dara Khosrowshahi. With this round, the company has raised a total of $23 million to date.

Founded in 2023, Pillar is designed to automate hedging for businesses operating in sectors such as metals, food, and aviation. Hedging refers to the practice of placing trades that can offset potential losses from other financial exposures. The commodities market has experienced significant volatility over the past year, largely driven by shifting geopolitical conditions, making risk management increasingly critical for companies in these industries.

According to co-founder and CEO Harsha Ramesh, who started the company alongside CTO Chinmay Deshpande, the platform leverages artificial intelligence to ingest and interpret data from a wide range of sources. These include client contracts, cash flows, inventory systems, ERP platforms, spreadsheets, and even communication channels such as WhatsApp. The system continuously evaluates exposure across commodities, foreign exchange, and freight markets.

Based on this analysis, Pillar builds and manages hedging portfolios for its clients and dynamically adjusts positions in response to market conditions, volatility, and each client’s risk tolerance. The platform is also capable of executing trades and monitoring exposure in real time, effectively transforming hedging from a periodic activity into a continuous, automated process.

Pillar’s current client base includes companies such as Shibuya Sakura Industries, which deals in commodities like metals; Sigma Recycling; and United Metal Solutions Group.

Ramesh brings prior experience as a macro trader, where he managed large derivatives portfolios and worked with major corporations to hedge foreign exchange and interest rate risk. He also spent time working within a mid-sized import-export business, which shaped his perspective on the gap between large financial institutions and smaller operators.

“What stood out was that sophisticated institutions had access to tools, infrastructure, and talent, while the actual producers, importers, and manufacturers driving global trade had little to no access to this,” he said. “Risk management was treated as a luxury, despite being essential.”

Pillar aims to bridge that gap by delivering institutional-grade risk management tools to small and medium-sized enterprises. “Our goal is to make hedging as accessible and ubiquitous as payments or accounting software,” Ramesh added.

The company operates in a space that includes traditional trading desks at major banks, as well as specialised commodity risk platforms such as Topaz and RadarRadar.

Despite its emphasis on automation, Pillar still incorporates human oversight. Ramesh noted that people remain involved in approvals, monitoring, and strategic decisions, particularly in complex scenarios such as large transactions, where human judgment complements the system’s automated execution.