AI-Powered Supply Chain Visibility Boosted as Altana Raises $100M

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The global supply chain is a complex interplay of a myriad of supplier, component, and finished product relationships traversing an increasingly challenging macroeconomic landscape.

Vendors trying to help organizations and governments gain actionable supply chain insights include New York-based Altana Technologies, which was founded in 2018. The first three years of existence of the company have been devoted to creating a new type of federated knowledge. graphical data system that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to help organizations make sense of their global supply chains.

It's a business that has been buoyed by rapid demand, particularly over the past year, as pandemic, inflation and security concerns have again strained and challenged the focus on global supply chain management. This led the company to announce that it had raised $100 million in a Series B funding round. The new funding comes just a year after the company raised a much smaller Series A from $15 million in September 2021.

“The reason venture capital and financial markets are typically frozen is inflation, war, weather disruption and supply chain shocks,” said Evan Smith, CEO and co-founder of 'Altana at VentureBeat. "These same elements are actually driving demand for our platform."

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register here How Altana's AI-Powered Supply Chain Platform Works

While still a young company, Altana already has major clients on its list, including U.S. Customs and Border Protection, Boston Scientific, BMW, Maersk, and Merck.

Getting to the current state of the company took time and technical innovation. Smith explained that Altana's original thesis was to build a living map of the supply chain that connects and powers the things around it.

"You have to somehow access all of the non-public supply chain data and learn from it," Smith said. "You can't just scrape the internet like Google did and put a search index on it."

Smith explained that what his company has developed is a federated series of data and machine learning platforms, all of which work in unison to learn through siled data. He noted that Google Maps is a good metaphor for what Altana is trying to do, providing users with a unified map or view of the supply chain.

"We are building a map of the supply chain network using artificial intelligence to provide decision support to customers," he said.

Where AI adds value

Smith explained that Altana uses AI for several purposes.

At a fundamental level, AI helps Altana build a model of the supply chain world using the raw data it can access through the federated network. The ability to ingest and load data from multiple sources in an array of different formats and languages ​​is a complex task where AI can play a vital role.

Altana uses AI to provide analytics and decision support in addition to its global supply chain map. Smith said Altana uses several AI technologies, including natural language processing