01/Why we exist

Money leaves a distribution business quietly, and nobody in the building owns finding it.

It leaves through an order keyed as eaches instead of cases, a reorder point nobody re-ran after the last demand spike, a deduction that expired before anyone had 30 minutes to match it to a POD. Every one of those tasks has an owner. The leak itself has none, and that is not anybody's fault.

Nextas exists to own it. We find where the money is leaking in your distribution operation, then build the systems that stop it, without adding headcount. Two people do that work, in one industry, and both of their names and faces are further down this page.

02/How we operate

The audit comes first, and it is refundable

We run a paid diagnostic before we propose anything. If the answer is a process change or a report you already own, we say so and give the money back.

Build for a real Monday

Everything we build has to survive a portal export that changed column order, a UOM keyed as eaches instead of cases, and a 5am outage.

Stay and be accountable

The monthly partnership is required because we want to be financially responsible for whether it still works in month twelve.

Speak plainly

If a system saved 18 hours a week, we say 18 hours a week. No optimism bias, no marketing language.

One industry, not fifty

US distribution and wholesale, in four segments. We would rather know how your fill rate is measured than have a bigger market to sell into.

Why audit-first

88% of companies have bought AI. Only 6% get real value out of it. The gap is implementation, not technology.

42% of those initiatives were abandoned in 2025, up from 17% the year before, mostly generic tools dropped into an operation nobody studied first.

03/The founders do the work

Everything either of them has to show you was earned before Nextas existed, in their own names. We label it that way on purpose.

Andrea (Andrew) Barbera

Runs every audit

Andrew runs the audits. Two years and 27 engagements building AI systems inside US construction firms, so he knows how an owner talks, what he measures, and the exact point in a growth conversation where operational chaos becomes the real problem. That is what he listens for.

Before that he co-founded and scaled a software startup, then ran startups and venture capital for a 9-person team working with 25+ startups. He studied business and AI at UC Berkeley's Haas School, was part of the Silicon Valley Fellowship, and won a US collegiate startup competition.

LinkedIn ->

Nikola (Nick) Fatori

Builds every system

Nick builds the systems. Two years of them running in production, mostly for consumer brands and the people running their inventory and fulfillment: reading emailed PDFs and portal exports, writing into the ERP and the spreadsheets already in place, and acting on their own when a number moves.

His sharpest catch was a European consumer brand doing about €10M a year, spending $30,000-$60,000 a quarter advertising SKUs that had quietly sold out. The ads kept running, the stock was gone, and no report in the building put those two facts side by side. His system caught it and he took over the media buying. He also built a demand-spike watchdog that flags the SKU about to stock out over a weekend, and he runs his own reporting off a system that assembles it before he is awake and flags what moved. He has done AI and data work with a German construction firm as well.