$1.4M Pre-Seed fuels Source, the AI startup led by 18-year-old Liam Fuller

Irish-founded retailtech startup Source has secured $1.4 million in Pre-Seed funding. 

Source, headquartered in Dublin, Ireland and registered as QuickFind AI, Inc., a Delaware C-Corp, has developed a platform that automates stock purchasing for retailers using agentic AI. 

I spoke with CEO and founder Liam Fuller, now 18 years old, to learn more.  He shared that he grew up in quite an entrepreneurial household from a young age.  He had a number of successful businesses, including CartShare, a Shopify plug-in launched during the Stripe × OpenAI-backed Patch youth accelerator. 

Never afraid of the hussle, at 17, Liam Fuller took a VC call from his school bathroom. It earned him a two-day suspension – and viral fame. 

While talking to e-commerce stores, trying to pitch this new piece of software to them, he realised there's a lot more to their business than just what's on their website. In fact, most of their revenue came from their physical retail locations.

So he got curious:

"Okay, what are these backend functions that are fundamental to your business? What are the operational requirements?

I remember talking to a pharmacy in Dublin, and a couple of other retailers, and they were like, ÄWe have 10,000 to 15,000 SKUs, and maybe three people managing that." One retailer told me they spend over €100 million a year, and three or four people manage it.

I asked them, "Okay, where do you go to buy this stuff?" Like, you have to buy goods to sell to consumers. And they said, "It's all through email and Excel." And I was like, what?

Because the way I buy goods is through Amazon, that's how the idea for Source came about."

Customers frequently told Fuller that ordering stock was a painfully manual process. "I was shocked to find that most businesses, especially retailers, still rely on email and Excel to buy hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of stock every week," Fuller says. 

He later met CTO Yoan Gabison in a Discord forum, and together they transformed CartShare insights into Source. 

Source is an AI procurement tool that takes all of this unstructured data across a retailer's operations, such as low stock inventory reports, invoices, email inboxes, ERPs, and Excel spreadsheets, processes it, and provides buyers with suggestions on what to order and why.

According to Fuller, "it helps buyers who are working 12 to 13-hour days and managing large SKU counts to understand what they need to buy and when."

"Source provides a simple interface allowing retail buyers to understand what they should buy and when by integrating into Excel, email & ERPs.

Source scans inventory and past sales data to generate forecasts and suggest purchase orders with AI that humans can edit and approve with a single click." 

According to Fuller, larger retailers already have this technology. They spend a lot on their tech stacks — they can be spending €30 to €40 million a year just on their ERP system. 

However, the problem is small to medium-sized retail businesses. They might have a system, or a few systems, but nothing really works well. 

"There's a real opportunity to build something lighter-weight. I'm not telling them to rip out their existing systems. I'm saying, 'Let your systems work for you, and I'll help make them better.'

These businesses are often dragged down by operational tasks. They're trying to compete against local pharmacies and café chains— it's intense."

Specifically, Source is an API-based integration with their existing stack. But it's relatively plug-and-play. You sync your data — ERP, Excel spreadsheets, email inbox — and Source scans it to build a comprehensive context of your operations.

The platform has two main components. First, a prompt box that the user can type in to find suppliers or place an order with a specific supplier. Second, a Suggested Order feature, which, according to Fuller, "a lot of our pilot users really wanted." 

"Because when you're managing 10,000 SKUs with three or four people, it's hard to make smart decisions.

You're trying to consider low stock reports, inventory levels, social media campaigns, promotions all at once. With new reasoning models and advancements in AI, we can now help buyers consistently make better decisions — and get better over time."

Source provides two major wins for users: time saved, and the ability to see missed opportunities.

Fuller shared: 

"I've talked to buyers working 10- to 13-hour days — and six of those hours are just admin. That's a lot of manual, repetitive, difficult work. It wears people down.

So time saved is one. But for the business overall, it's about surfacing missed opportunities and improving decisions over time, based on past data. We also get a lot of positive feedback on the UI — especially compared to old ERP systems that have been around for 20 or 30 years.

Some of those vendors are already nervous about what we're doing, which I think is a good sign."

While visiting family in Australia last April, Fuller secured a meeting with Australian VC Square Peg co-founder Paul Bassat.

Square Peg — early backer of Canva, Airwallex and Rokt — led the round, alongside former Stripe CTO David Singleton and the Xtripe angel syndicate. 

CEO and co-founder Liam Fuller is Square Peg's youngest portfolio founder to date and has now left school to build Source full-time.

According to Bassat who closed the round within weeks: 

"I've been impressed by many young entrepreneurs, but Liam combines technical sophistication with commercial instincts that are rare at any age. We're not just excited by his current vision for Source – we're excited by his ability to navigate and adapt as the business evolves.

When someone demonstrates this level of execution and strategic thinking at seventeen, the growth trajectory becomes incredibly compelling."

Source has almost ten pilots in operation and has set its sights on the US market. 

According to Fuller, "at this early stage, we're still figuring things out — like how buyers often can't even make good decisions today, not just automate what they already do. We learned that only by deploying on customer systems."

"So I thought, if I'm going to do customer discovery in the UK and Ireland, why not do it in the US too? That's where I ultimately want to build the business. My co-founder and I both want to be there.

There's just so much happening there. It's a big market, and there's lots of exciting stuff going on."

He admits to the appeal of the US with "more conglomerates, more ERP systems, different distribution channels. Some B2B commerce platforms have been serving thousands of retailers for 20 years. That infrastructure doesn't exist in Ireland."

The exciting part is bringing modern tools — like reasoning models and agentic AI — into traditional industries.

"Lots of people are focused on chatbots or niche tools. I want to help businesses still running on Excel and email. That's a massive part of the economy."

The capital will double the engineering headcount, launch US pilot programmes this autumn, and finance a relocation to Silicon Valley later this year. In parallel, Source has joined the NDRC Accelerator, operated by Dogpatch Labs in Dublin. 

Lead image: CEO and co-founder Liam Fuller. Photo: uncredited.