AS SEEN IN STEEL MARKET UPDATE YEARBOOK 2026
Steel sales run on trust. It's never just about a single transaction. But how do you capture the massive amounts of data sitting hidden in your RFQ emails without disrupting your sales team's workflow?
Our team, Sree Patlola and Casey Timko, sat down with Steel Market Update for their 2026 Yearbook to discuss how Felux is giving steel leadership complete demand visibility upstream.
Read our full featured interview and see a sneak peek of our analytics platform here:
Text version Below:
Interview
Felux: Sree Patlola, Head of Engineering & Casey Timko, Head of Business Development
By Thomas Willatt, Projects Director, Communities, CRU
Originally published in Steel Market Update Yearbook 2026, CRU.
Felux was founded with a simple ambition: bring modern technology to the steel industry. What began in 2019 as a marketplace concept evolved as the team spent more time learning how steel service centers, mills, and OEMs actually buy and sell material. Along the way, Felux discovered that the biggest opportunity was not in trying to replace the transaction itself, but in better capturing and organizing the data behind it.
That shift led the company toward an AI-driven demand analytics and workflow platform designed specifically for the steel industry. Rather than asking sales teams to abandon the relationship-based processes that already work, Felux aims to operate quietly in the background—reading RFQ traffic, organizing and analyzing requested data and surfacing insights leadership teams can use to make better quoting and purchasing decisions.
For Sree Patlola, Felux’s Head of Engineering, and Casey Timko, Senior Accountant, the company’s direction reflects years of listening to customers and adapting to what the market actually needs. Their message is that steel remains a relationship business, but one where better demand visibility, cleaner data capture, and more precise analytics can help service centers act faster and with more confidence.
Could you start by telling us how Felux was formed and what problems in steel sales and service centers it was created to fix?
Casey: Felux started in 2019 with a pretty simple idea: bring modern technology to the steel industry. We started with the marketplace. The goal was to open up the market, give service centers access to more inventory, and modernize how things worked.
It turned out that the marketplace idea wasn’t a fit for the industry, but it taught us a lot. In the process, we learned how steel service centers buy and sell material, what the day-to-day workflow really looks like, and how RFQs are managed. What we found was that it all really comes down to capturing and making sense of their request and demand data.
As we went through that process, we realized we could build modern technology for the steel industry around using AI and algorithms and design it in a way that actually helps customers accomplish that goal.
What were one or two of the biggest lessons Felux learned in its early years working with mills, service centers, and OEMs?
Sree: One of the biggest lessons was just how relationship-driven this industry is. Steel sales run on trust that has been built over years. It is not about a single transaction. That was a major learning moment for us. A salesperson’s relationship with a buyer can matter more than price or even lead time. So any platform that tries to insert itself into that relationship creates friction.
The second lesson that followed from that was that the real value has to be captured passively through data without asking the reps to change how they work. We realized the most durable value was not in facilitating the transaction itself, because the steel industry already has that covered. The value we can bring is in mining the data that sits behind the transaction—RFQs in email, product specs, what was quoted, what was not quoted—and then presenting it in a clean demand analytics dashboard. That is where the opportunity is.
Can you share some insight into the decision to move from the marketplace model to an AI-powered operating system for steel service centers?
Sree: For a brief time, Felux also operated as a brokerage, but that is no longer the case. Going through that experience helped us understand how a steel service center actually works and how much signal is sitting in RFQ emails.
And by signal, I mean not just the RFQ itself, but product specs, customer demand, request patterns, whether a salesperson is quoting, why they may not be quoting, and how little of that information was being captured. We saw a real vacuum there. Then, with advances in AI, machine learning, and natural language processing, we became confident that we could build something capable of capturing and presenting that value in a meaningful way for steel sales teams.
With today’s AI capabilities, no one should have to manually enter every RFQ into a CRM. Felux can capture it passively from the inbox with very little added work, very little process change, and no major disruption. Leadership can finally see what customers are actually requesting, which products are in demand, and what they may need to stock more of.
And if you take that one step further, service centers can also use that demand signal in discussions with mills. They can show quantified demand from OEMs for a specific product. That can strengthen purchasing conversations upstream as well.
In practical terms, how does Felux change a salesperson’s or sales manager’s day? What do they stop doing manually, and what can they see or act on that they could not before?
Casey: We really do not want to disrupt a sales rep’s day-to-day workflow. They can keep managing their inbox exactly the way they already do. The change is more about giving the leadership team better visibility and moving information upstream.
What that means in practice is leadership can see a full demand funnel. They can see what reps are quoting, what is being no-quoted, which products are being missed, and what they may need to purchase more of because they are turning down orders for material they do not have on the floor.
It is about giving sales reps another tool in the toolbox. Giving management better data to make purchasing and sales decisions, all while helping reps stay focused on customer relationships.
When you explain Felux’s AI to customers, how do you describe what it actually does with RFQ emails and sales data? And how do you reassure them that it is there to support relationships rather than replace them?
Sree: Think of Felux as if every salesperson had an admin assistant and an analyst working beside them at all times. Every time an email comes in, that assistant reads it, identifies who sent it, pulls out what is being requested, and organizes it neatly in a CRM-style view.
Then, as the salesperson responds—whether they win the business, continue the discussion, or no-quote because they do not have inventory—the status is updated automatically in the background. The salesperson does not have to stop and enter anything manually.
That is the key point: this is not a black box making decisions for you. It is an organizer and an assistant. You can keep using your inbox exactly the way you already do. The system is simply collecting information passively, organizing it, and presenting it back in a way that helps you analyze demand data and manage customer activity more effectively, all while keeping your data protected and within your own organization.
We are not replacing the rep or the relationship. We are supporting it with better visibility.
Looking ahead, what are the next big priorities for the product and for Felux as a company?
Sree: Our next priorities are always shaped by customers. One of the biggest requests we hear is for more precision. Right now, we can tell a service center that it is missing a lot of demand in a category like galvanneal. The next step is to make that much more exact.
What we want is SKU-level analytics. Instead of simply saying you are missing demand in one product group, we want to show the exact gauge, width, coating, and tonnage that is being missed. That allows purchasing and processing decisions to become much more obvious rather than just directional.
There are also smaller feature requests around smarter inbox tools, such as auto follow-up reminders and better ways to filter signal from noise, so salespeople can focus only on RFQs rather than unrelated emails.
Then there is the bigger integration track. We are very interested in ERP and CRM integrations because leadership increasingly wants a more holistic view. They want to compare what is sitting on the floor with what customers are actually demanding. That is where the product can become even more powerful.
Longer term, we also believe this demand signal can move upstream. Service centers can use actual demand data to support stronger conversations with mills and make purchasing decisions with real numbers behind them.
As you look ahead to this year’s SMU Steel Summit, what conversations are you hoping to have with mills, service centers, and OEMs? And what is one question you would encourage people to ask you at the event?
Casey: We are looking forward to conversations about how we can help the steel industry more and how we can keep refining the product so it actually makes sales reps’ lives easier while giving leadership the data they need to make better buying decisions.
The question we would really encourage people to ask is: what is the hardest part about staying on top of customer demand right now?
We also want to hear where they feel they have strong visibility and where they feel they still have blind spots. That is the kind of conversation that helps us keep building in the right direction.
