Tequipy Raises €3M to Automate Global IT Device Logistics
Polish-British startup Tequipy secures €3M+ from Smedvig Ventures to revolutionize employee device management across 180+ countries globally.
TL;DR
Polish-British startup Tequipy just closed a €3 million funding round led by Smedvig Ventures to transform how companies manage IT equipment for remote teams. Founded by Revolut's former IT chief Tomek Stawarski, the platform automates device deployment across 180 countries in just three days. Over 150 companies now use Tequipy to handle everything from procurement to recycling, freeing IT teams from manual logistics work.
Revolutionizing Global IT Device Management: Former Revolut Executive Launches Next-Gen Automation Platform
The landscape of enterprise IT operations is undergoing a significant transformation as organizations increasingly adopt remote and globally distributed workforce models. Managing technology infrastructure across multiple countries has become one of the most pressing operational challenges for growing companies . Traditional approaches to device procurement, deployment, and lifecycle management often prove inadequate when scaling operations internationally, leading to inefficiencies that drain both time and resources from IT departments.
A groundbreaking solution has emerged from an unlikely source: the very person who experienced these challenges firsthand while scaling one of Europe's fastest-growing fintech companies. The Polish-British technology startup Tequipy has successfully secured over €3 million in strategic funding to expand its innovative platform that automates the complete lifecycle of employee IT devices across borders . This funding round, spearheaded by Smedvig Ventures with additional backing from Manta Ray and Unfold.vc, represents a pivotal moment in the evolution of enterprise IT management for distributed organizations.
The platform addresses a critical pain point that has long plagued companies operating in multiple jurisdictions. When businesses hire talent across different countries, equipping them with the necessary hardware becomes exponentially more complex than simply purchasing a laptop . Each device must navigate procurement regulations, customs procedures, security configurations, and delivery logistics that vary dramatically from one country to another. The manual processes currently employed by most IT teams create bottlenecks that can delay employee onboarding by weeks or even months, directly impacting productivity and organizational agility.
The Genesis of Innovation Born from Real-World Experience
The story behind Tequipy's creation reflects the authentic problem-solving approach that characterizes the most successful technology ventures. Tomek Stawarski, who serves as co-founder and CEO, witnessed the breakdown of device logistics on an unprecedented scale during his tenure as Global Head of IT at Revolut . During his time there, he oversaw IT operations expanding from a modest 100 employees in two offices to a massive 5,000-person workforce distributed across 17 countries. This experience provided invaluable insights into the systemic failures of conventional device management approaches.
Stawarski's observations revealed a troubling pattern: highly skilled IT professionals who should have been architecting scalable systems and solving complex technical challenges were instead spending their days repacking boxes, manually wiping laptops, and troubleshooting shipment delays at international borders . This misallocation of talent represented not just an efficiency problem but a fundamental strategic weakness for organizations trying to scale rapidly in competitive markets. The realization that this scenario was replicated across thousands of companies worldwide became the catalyst for creating a comprehensive solution.
Together with co-founders Bart Czerkies and Albert Podraza, both former colleagues from Revolut, Stawarski established Tequipy in 2022 with a clear mission: to eliminate the manual drudgery from global device operations and allow IT teams to focus on strategic initiatives rather than logistical firefighting . The founding team's deep operational experience in managing technology at scale gives them unique credibility and insight into the problems they're solving, setting them apart from competitors who may understand the theory but lack practical battlefield experience.
Comprehensive Platform Architecture Spanning 180 Countries
The technical infrastructure underpinning Tequipy's service represents a sophisticated blend of software automation and strategic partnership networks. Unlike traditional enterprise IT vendors that rely on centralized warehousing and lengthy procurement contracts, Tequipy has built a decentralized model that leverages local expertise and resources in over 180 countries . This approach fundamentally reimagines how devices flow through the global supply chain, prioritizing speed and flexibility over the economies of scale that characterize legacy providers.
At the operational level, the platform maintains relationships with more than 800 authorized resellers distributed across its global network . When a company needs to onboard a new employee in any supported country, Tequipy sources the required hardware locally rather than shipping it from a central hub. This localization strategy eliminates many of the customs delays, shipping costs, and logistical complications that plague traditional models. Devices are pre-configured to integrate seamlessly with the client's existing Mobile Device Management systems, including popular platforms like Jamf, Intune, and JumpCloud, ensuring security protocols are maintained from the moment the employee receives their equipment.
The speed advantages of this approach are remarkable. According to company data, the average delivery time for a fully configured device is just three days from the moment an order is placed . This represents a dramatic improvement over conventional procurement methods, which often require weeks or months to navigate international shipping, customs clearance, and configuration processes. For rapidly growing companies where time-to-productivity for new hires directly impacts business outcomes, this acceleration in deployment timelines creates substantial competitive advantages.
The platform's scope extends far beyond initial device deployment. Tequipy manages the entire lifecycle of IT hardware, including ongoing servicing, employee offboarding procedures, secure device recovery, storage management, redeployment to new team members, and eventual sellback or recycling . This comprehensive approach eliminates the fragmented vendor relationships that typically characterize enterprise IT operations, where different providers handle procurement, shipping, repairs, and asset disposal. By consolidating these functions into a single integrated platform, Tequipy reduces administrative overhead while maintaining visibility and control throughout the device lifecycle.
Addressing the Manual Operations Crisis in Enterprise IT
The problem Tequipy solves extends beyond simple logistics to address a fundamental misalignment between how modern companies operate and how IT infrastructure is traditionally managed. As organizations have embraced remote work and global talent acquisition, the operational model for supporting distributed teams has lagged significantly behind . Most IT departments continue to rely on improvised solutions cobbled together from spreadsheets, email threads with local vendors, relationships with multiple courier services, customs brokers, and storage facilities across different countries. Each additional country in which a company operates adds another layer of complexity and potential failure points to this already precarious system.
The manual nature of these processes creates several cascading problems. First, they consume enormous amounts of time from IT professionals who could be creating value in higher-leverage activities. Second, they introduce variability and inconsistency in how employees are equipped and supported across different locations, potentially creating security vulnerabilities and compliance issues . Third, they lack the visibility and reporting capabilities that modern businesses require to make informed decisions about hardware spending, utilization rates, and lifecycle optimization. Fourth, they scale poorly, meaning that the operational burden grows exponentially rather than linearly as companies expand into additional markets.
Large enterprise IT vendors theoretically offer solutions to some of these challenges, but their models often prove ill-suited for fast-growing mid-market companies. These vendors typically require long-term contracts, impose minimum volume requirements, add substantial markups to hardware costs, and operate on timelines that don't align with the agility requirements of modern businesses . Their centralized warehousing approaches also reintroduce many of the shipping delays and customs complications that local sourcing can avoid. For companies in high-growth phases, these constraints can be deal-breakers, leaving them to continue managing device operations through manual processes despite the obvious inefficiencies.
Strategic Vision for Comprehensive IT Automation
While hardware logistics represents Tequipy's initial focus and current core offering, the company's strategic vision extends considerably further. The founding team views device management as the foundation layer of a much broader IT automation platform that will eventually encompass software provisioning, security operations, and the full spectrum of employee technology lifecycle management . This phased approach reflects both technical pragmatism and strategic positioning, as hardware represents the most difficult aspect of IT operations to automate due to its intersection with the physical world.
Co-founder Albert Podraza articulated this strategic logic clearly, noting that hardware automation across 180 countries serves as the ultimate stress test for their platform architecture . If the system can reliably manage physical devices through complex international supply chains, customs procedures, and last-mile delivery challenges, then automating the layers above it becomes significantly more straightforward. The subsequent expansion phases will address software management, including employee account provisioning, license management, access control, password management, and related processes that currently consume substantial IT resources throughout the employee lifecycle.
The third layer of the platform roadmap focuses on security operations, an increasingly critical concern for distributed organizations. As companies scale across multiple jurisdictions, maintaining consistent security postures, ensuring compliance with varying regulatory requirements, and managing the expanding attack surface of a distributed workforce become exponentially more complex . By integrating security management into the same unified platform that handles hardware and software provisioning, Tequipy aims to create an environment where security policies can be consistently enforced from the moment an employee is hired through their eventual departure from the organization.
This comprehensive vision positions Tequipy to address what co-founder Bart Czerkies describes as the fundamental shift in how IT teams should operate . Rather than handling thousands of individual tickets and exceptions manually, the future IT department should function more like air traffic controllers: supervising automated processes, intervening only when human judgment provides genuine value, and focusing energy on building scalable systems rather than executing repetitive operational tasks. This paradigm shift from execution to orchestration represents a fundamental reimagining of the IT function's role within modern organizations.
Market Validation and Growing Customer Adoption
The platform's value proposition has resonated strongly with its target market, as evidenced by adoption from over 150 companies worldwide. The customer base includes recognized names such as Booksy, Connecteam, Gigs, ICEYE, RemoFirst, and Taptap Send, representing a diverse range of industries and use cases . This customer diversity demonstrates the platform's applicability across different business models and operational contexts, rather than serving a narrow niche.
The typical customer journey reflects the compound nature of the problem Tequipy solves. Companies often initially approach the platform with a specific urgent need: a new hire in a particular country who needs equipment quickly, or an existing manual process that has broken down and created an operational crisis . The initial engagement frequently focuses on a single country or use case, allowing the company to validate Tequipy's capabilities in a controlled environment with limited risk. However, once customers experience the superior speed, reliability, and visibility that the platform provides compared to their existing processes, they typically expand the relationship to cover additional countries and use cases.
This expansion pattern validates several aspects of Tequipy's business model. First, it demonstrates that the platform delivers genuine operational improvements that customers can measure and experience directly. Second, it suggests high customer satisfaction and retention, as initial deployments lead to expanded relationships rather than churning after solving the immediate problem . Third, it indicates that the platform successfully addresses not just point solutions but systemic operational challenges, creating ongoing value as customer needs evolve and expand. This type of land-and-expand growth pattern typically characterizes enterprise software companies with strong product-market fit and defensible competitive positions.
The Road Ahead: Scaling Operations and Expanding Capabilities
The newly secured funding will accelerate Tequipy's evolution from a hardware logistics specialist into a comprehensive IT automation platform. The capital enables the company to invest in product development for the software and security layers of their platform while simultaneously expanding their global partner network and customer success capabilities . This dual focus on both product expansion and market penetration reflects the maturity of the company's strategic thinking and their recognition that sustainable growth requires excellence in both dimensions.
The competitive landscape for enterprise IT management tools remains fragmented, with different vendors addressing specific aspects of the overall problem but few offering truly integrated solutions. This fragmentation creates opportunities for platforms like Tequipy that can consolidate multiple functions into unified offerings with better user experiences and lower total cost of ownership . As remote and distributed work patterns continue to cement themselves as permanent features of the business landscape rather than temporary pandemic responses, the market for tools that support these operating models will likely continue expanding significantly.
For IT leaders at globally distributed organizations, the emergence of platforms like Tequipy represents a meaningful shift in what's possible. The manual, improvised approaches that many teams currently employ out of necessity rather than choice can increasingly be replaced by automated systems that deliver superior outcomes with less human intervention . This transition allows IT departments to elevate their strategic role within organizations, moving from being viewed primarily as cost centers that keep technology functioning to becoming enablers of business agility and competitive advantage. As the platform continues maturing and expanding its capabilities, it has the potential to fundamentally reshape how companies think about equipping and supporting globally distributed workforces in an increasingly digital economy.