What do Lidl, Auchan, Sephora and Flink have in common? They’re all customers of RELEX Solutions, one of Finland’s four private tech companies.

RELEX makes supply-chain and retail-planning software — which might sound boring, but it's extremely important when you consider how much inventory, especially food, is wasted due to poor planning.

Sifted sat down with cofounder Johanna Småros to talk about the company’s decades-long journey from academia to commercialisation, just how many millions of kilos of waste annually the company is helping to avoid and why RELEX’s engineers are tired of hearing about AI.