Altana AI, a supply chain startup, has roped in $15 million in a Series A funding round led by GV along with participants including Ridgeline Partners, Schematic Ventures, Floating Point, and Amadeus Capital Partners.
According to Altana AI CEO, Evan Smith, the funds will be utilized to expand Altana's data and AI systems and introduce new machine learning and network analysis tools. The recent financing brings the company's total raised funds to $22 million.
Currently, supply chain networks and global trade flows are undergoing fundamental changes due to trade conflicts, rise of ecommerce, pandemic supply chain shocks, and sustainability concerns.
Sources cite that nearly 75% of organizations have experienced supply chain interruptions as a result of pandemic-related transportation restrictions. While a recent IBM study states that 40% of CEOs have recognized the need to have extra capacity to limit future crises.
Altana's technology seeks to tackle these problems with a platform that links and learns from many supply chain data points. It answers questions about items, shipments, businesses, and networks, sorting out illegal trade and identifying bad factors and security risks across global trade networks.
Mr. Smith claims that their firm is addresses an intractable challenge by providing a single source of truth for the global supply chain network. Currently, information like the source of a supplied product, what's inside a package, or its extensive supply chain networks are unknown. Altana provides information on these issues using data.
Credible sources claim that Altana is focused on a knowledge graph, a global supply chain database that is kept up to date using a federated machine learning technique.
According to Mr. Smith, this permits the platform to study from sensitive data that would never be directly gathered and shared due to intellectual property, privacy, and sovereignty problems.