We build for the companies that move the world’s commodities.
An operating system for the physical commodity trading industry, built by people who have lived the work.
Why we care
Physical commodities feed, build, and power the world.
They are the hidden operating system of the global economy, and almost everything around you passed through a trade that someone negotiated, financed, and moved.
It is one of the oldest and largest industries on earth, and one of the least served by modern software. While the rest of finance and logistics has been rebuilt around technology, physical commodity trading still runs on phone calls, PDFs, and systems built decades ago.
We think that is backwards. The people who move the physical world deserve the best software in it. That is what we are building.
Culture
What we value
Earn the desk’s trust
Our customers move real cargo under real pressure, and they only trust software that earns it. We learn the work as well as they do, answer before they have to chase us, and take their problems on as our own. We win when they win.
Move at market speed
Markets do not wait, and neither do we. The industry has gone decades without software that fits, so we ship, learn, and improve in days, not quarters. A small team that moves fast makes an outsized difference.
Kill the busywork
“That is how it has always been done” is where we start, not where we stop. We hunt down the workaround, the re-keyed PDF, and the spreadsheet everyone tolerates, and replace them with something better.
Own the outcome
We do what we say and own the result the customer feels, not just the task that produced it. No one here points at someone else’s lane.
Who we are
The founding team
CommodityAI is built in the Bay Area by a team that pairs two things the market rarely combines: years on a physical commodity trading desk, and engineers who built at technology companies.
Philip Koenig
Co-founder & CEO
Started at KPMG, then spent seven years trading physical sugar at ED&F Man and Grupo Pantaleon. He lived the manual back office CommodityAI exists to fix.
Kyle Franz
Co-founder & CTO
An engineering leader who built enterprise software at Autodesk and LeanData. He leads the AI agent platform.
Daniel Cervoni
Co-founder & COO
Graduated from Wharton, then joined Samsara as an engineer and helped take it from startup to public company. He runs operations and go-to-market.
Where the team has built, traded, and shipped
Careers