When I was in secondary school, I was often entrusted by senior kinsmen in my village to help manage their home-building projects. They would arrive from the city on Saturday, provide funds for construction, and return to work on Sunday. My assignment was simple: buy cement, iron rods, sand, gravel, and other materials so that work could continue during the week.
But there was always a problem. You never truly knew what you were getting from a tipper load of sand or gravel. It was a non-optimized system because no one measured the exact quantity of sand or gravel in those tippers!
In construction, there are established ratios when mixing cement, sand, gravel, and water depending on the pillar, beam, etc requirements. Experienced bricklayers understand these numbers instinctively. Yet the entire process depends on one assumption: the bulk sand and gravel would align in volume!
Register for Tekedia Mini-MBA edition 20 (June 8 – Sept 5, 2026).
Register for Tekedia AI in Business Masterclass.
Join Tekedia Capital Syndicate and co-invest in great global startups.
Register for Tekedia AI Lab.
What if the sand-truck is not carrying the volume you think it is; say it was off by 50 “headpans” of sand? Suddenly, an invisible inefficiency enters the project. Costs rise, and no one can precisely identify where the losses occurred.
Now expand that problem beyond a village construction site. Think about mega agriculture. Think about mining. Think about ports, terminals, feed mills, aggregates, logistics hubs, and industrial warehouses. Across these sectors, enormous quantities of value are stored in piles, heaps, mounds, and bulk inventory that do not fit neatly into boxes, containers, or barcodes.
Yes, what we fail to measure accurately often becomes a hidden source of inefficiency. Remembering that experience, we found Rebulk exciting. The company uses advanced computer vision, LiDAR, and AI to accurately measure and monitor bulk inventory such as feed, sand, aggregates, grain, minerals, and other assets. Instead of relying on estimates, organizations gain precise visibility into inventory volumes, movements, utilization, and operational performance.
The market immediately understood the value proposition. Within weeks, one of the world’s largest agricultural companies signed a US$10 million contract with Rebulk, validating the thesis. The company continues to expand its platform. Today, customers can manage rail-served terminals through a unified system that integrates railcars, inventory, bills of lading, scale tickets, demurrage management, and customer reporting into a single operational environment.
Sometimes the biggest opportunities are hidden in problems that everyone accepts as normal. For decades, people estimated. Rebulk decided to measure. That insight, and the enormous market opportunity behind it, were among the reasons Tekedia Capital invested in Rebulk. More wins ahead for Team Rebulk, the bulk inventory OS (operating system).
---
Connect via my
LinkedIn |
Facebook |
X |
YouTube
