An Indian-American entrepreneur on Wednesday announced the launch of an innovative global supply chain start up for which he has raised a seed money of USD 12.5 million from some of the well-known venture capitalists.
Investors to this startup named Trademo include marquee Silicon Valley venture capitalists Amit Singhal, (former SVP Google), Saama Capital, Neeraj Arora (former Chief Business Officer of WhatsApp), Sridhar Ramaswamy (Founder/CEO Neeva and former SVP Google) and Shalabh Singhal (founder/CEO Trademo), a media release said.
Founded in June 2020 by Shalabh Singhal, a third-time tech entrepreneur with over 10 years’ experience in building large scale B2B businesses; Trademo is building a global supply chain knowledge graph to help global-trade participants discover new opportunities, remain compliant with regulations, build operationally resilient supply chains, and grow commerce.
We are thrilled to partner with world-class investors who have built and funded some of the most successful data-centered organisations on the planet. We are building a deep tech company and wanted partners who can appreciate the value of products on top of a central global supply chain knowledge graph, said Shalabh Singhal, founder and CEO, Trademo.
Trademo will use these funds to invest in our products and team and accelerate our vision of providing end-to-end supply chain visibility, compliance and commerce solutions for global-trade participants, Singhal said.
COVID-19 and resulting supply chain disruptions fortified the idea of building a supply chain intelligence company for Shalabh.
He earlier co-founded a leading fintech lending start-up in India. He is an Alumni of Goldman Sachs, IIT BHU and CFA Institute.
Singhal said Trademo collects public and private data on global trade transactions, restricted parties, tariffs, ESG and adverse media events using its proprietary algorithms.
It connects and performs advanced data processing on billions of data points using technologies like graph database, Natural Language Processing (NLP) and machine learning to build end-to-end visibility on global supply chains.
Observing that global supply chains have rapidly become the foundation of the modern economy, Singhal referred to the recent disruptions in global supply chains during the COVID-19, or the Suez Canal blockage and the ingoing semiconductor shortages.
Periodic trade disputes and environmental, social and governance (ESG) concerns have further complicated supply chain management for every importer and exporter. Today’s technologies can solve a lot of this crisis, he told PTI in an interview.
Any particular product, or most of the products that we use today, on a day-to-day basis, have an integrated product value chain, he said, adding that today no single country is manufacturing the entire product themselves.
They come from multiple countries and in the case of a product like i-phone, dozens of countries are involved in the entire process.
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While this has become more integrated and much more complex over time, the tools, technologies and the procurement platform supply chain risk management platforms which companies have been using, over the past 20 years, have not evolved with the same pace, he said.
They don’t give me real time visibility on my supplier performance on my supplier’s supplier network on the several disruptions which can come and affect the supply chain right, he said.
Since I have been working closely with technology and this is a space which was quite intriguing to me, we realised that we need a complete technical overhaul on how the global supply chains are validated. Organisations cannot just depend on their own data which they have on their own supply chain network data that they have to take better decisions, but they actually need external intelligence, external events to use to their advantage, Singhal said.
The idea behind Trademo is that we can build a technology platform which can actually bring intelligence from different sources of data, he said in response to a question.
