You can see the bet in the product’s opening screen: a shared inbox, but not for a support team. The columns are labeled for purchase orders, inquiries, and complaints. The suggested next action isn’t “reply” but “transfer to ERP.” This is the first view inside Hoshii, a Zurich-based startup that has built what it calls an “AI-native inbox for B2B operations” [Hoshii]. It is a workspace designed for a specific, often overlooked user: the sales coordinator at a midsize wholesaler, whose job is to manually key emails from buyers into a clunky enterprise resource planning system. Hoshii’s premise is that this person doesn’t need a new ERP. They just need something to read their email for them.
The Wedge: An AI Layer, Not a Rip-and-Replace
Hoshii’s founders are not selling a platform to displace SAP or Microsoft Dynamics. Their wedge is workflow automation that sits on top of them. The product acts as a central communication hub, connecting to a company’s existing Outlook, email, WhatsApp, and webshop channels [StartupSeeker]. It uses AI to parse unstructured messages,an order form attached to an email, a quantity change sent via text,extract the relevant data, and prepare it for transfer into the ERP’s structured workflows [Venturelab, March 2025]. The human worker stays in the loop to verify and correct, but the manual data entry vanishes. For the target customer, a wholesaler or trading company, the value proposition is straightforward: keep your million-dollar software investment, but stop paying people to be its typing pool.
The Founders and the First Check
The team assembling this layer is a trio of co-founders with complementary Swiss pedigrees. Jiir Awdir, the CEO, holds a master’s from the University of St. Gallen and brought experience from stints at Swisscom, Roche, and Baloise [Venture Kick, May 2024]. Chihiro Okuyama, the Chief AI Officer, adds a master’s in mathematics from ETH Zurich [Venture Kick, May 2024]. Ayoub Chouak rounds out the group as CTO [FreshPlaza, November 2026]. Their initial backing is modest and emblematic of the Swiss startup ecosystem: a CHF 10,000 grant from Venture Kick, awarded in May 2024 [Venture Kick, May 2024]. It’s a classic first-validation step, not a venture-scale war chest, which frames Hoshii’s current phase as one of proving product-market fit with early design partners rather than a broad sales push.
| Role | Name | Key Background |
|---|---|---|
| Co-Founder & CEO | Jiir Awdir | Master’s, University of St. Gallen; ex-Swisscom, Roche, Baloise [Venture Kick, May 2024] |
| Co-Founder & CTO | Ayoub Chouak | Technical co-founder [FreshPlaza, November 2026] |
| Co-Founder & CAIO | Chihiro Okuyama | Master’s in Mathematics, ETH Zurich [Venture Kick, May 2024] |
The Traction Path in a Niche Market
Public traction metrics are not yet disclosed, but the company’s stated focus reveals its intended path to scale. Hoshii is aimed squarely at wholesalers and trading companies, with a particular emphasis on their sales and back-office teams [FreshPlaza, November 2026]. This is a deliberate niche. The workflows are repetitive and painful, the economic incentive to automate is clear, and the total addressable market, while not Silicon Valley-sized, is substantial across Europe’s dense network of small and medium-sized enterprises. Success would look like becoming the default AI workspace for a vertical industry, one where the founders believe they can achieve deep integration and customer understanding before horizontal players bother to look down.
The Integration Challenge
The most credible risk for Hoshii is not competition from a named startup, but the sheer complexity of the environment it promises to simplify. Its value hinges on smooth integration with a zoo of legacy ERPs, CRMs, and communication channels [StartupSeeker]. Each connection point is a potential source of friction, custom configuration, and support overhead. The company’s answer to this is its technical founding team and its narrow focus. By building for wholesalers first, it can develop deep, pre-built connectors for the most common systems in that sector, turning a generic integration problem into a curated, repeatable solution.
- Technical Depth. The co-founding team includes a dedicated CAIO with a strong mathematical background and a CTO, suggesting a build-first, rather than a wrap-and-ship, approach to the AI layer [Venture Kick, May 2024].
- Vertical Specificity. Focusing on wholesalers allows for tailored data models that understand purchase orders, incoterms, and product SKUs out of the box, improving accuracy over a generic tool.
- Go-to-Market Focus. A niche market enables a direct, high-touch sales motion to first customers, which is feasible with the current team size and funding stage.
The Next Twelve Months
The immediate horizon for Hoshii is defined by what comes after the Venture Kick grant. The next logical milestones are a priced pre-seed or seed round to build out the sales function and a public announcement of its first pilot customers. The company is already hiring for a forward-deployed software engineer, a role typically associated with implementing and customizing the product for early clients [Join.com, retrieved 2026]. The next year will be about moving from a promising prototype to a relied-upon system inside a handful of trading companies, proving that the AI agent can reliably handle the daily flood of orders without dropping a decimal point.
Every productivity tool answers a cultural question about work. Expensify asked if we minded our receipts being scanned. Slack asked if we were okay with work becoming a series of channels. Hoshii is asking a quieter, more specific question of the wholesale manager: Is the intelligence of your business trapped in your team’s Outlook, and are you willing to let a machine read it? The bet is that for an industry built on thin margins and thick manuals, the answer is becoming yes.
Sources
- [Venture Kick, May 2024] Startups developing an AI chat interface for B2B Wholesaler each get CHF 10000 | https://www.venturekick.ch/Startups-developing-an-AIchat-interface-for-B2B-Wholesaler-the-nextgen-smart-drug-eluting-coating-smart-wind-energy-expert-ultrasound-access-and-automated-gentle-organoid-sorting-each-get-CHF-10000
- [Hoshii, Unknown] Hoshii, https://www.hoshii.ai/en/
- [Venturelab, March 2025] Hoshii: The Venture Leader Technology automating communication for wholesalers | https://www.venturelab.swiss/Hoshii-The-Venture-Leader-Technology-automating-communication-for-wholesalers
- [FreshPlaza, November 2026] We support trading companies by making existing ERP software AI-capable | https://www.freshplaza.com/asia/article/9711598/we-support-trading-companies-by-making-existing-erp-software-ai-capable/
- [StartupSeeker, Unknown] Hoshii company profile | https://startup-seeker.com/company/hoshii~ai
- [Join.com, retrieved 2026] Forward Deployed Software Engineer role at Hoshii | https://join.com/companies/hoshii/16633234-forward-deployed-software-engineer