Sustainable supply chain traceability technology company Circulor announced Thursday it closed $14 million in new funding led by the Westly Group.

The Series A funding round was joined by Salesforce Ventures, BHP Ventures, Future Positive Capital, 24Haymarket, Sky Ocean Ventures and other existing investors.

Circulor uses blockchain distributed ledger technology to deliver end-to-end traceability in supply chains in order to demystify otherwise opaque systems. Blockchains allow every transaction to be automatically recorded and tracked with high granularity and trustworthy security across multiple organizations without worry that sensitive data will be leaked.

“Traceability-as-a-service is fast becoming a requirement for the world’s leading brands and this funding will help us accelerate our impact and revenue growth,” said Douglas Johnson-Poensgen, chief executive of Circulor.

The company has courted the electric vehicle industry, where it’s a proven technology for tracking materials and minerals used for batteries such as cobalt, mica and lithium. Circulor is also tracing other commodities including nickel, copper, plastics, and leather and is deployed circular economies as the recycling of automotive parts.

Some of Circulor’s more notable customers include Volvo Cars, who use the platform to trace and track cobalt; Polestar, used to assess the environmental and human rights risks behind sourcing nickel, lithium and mica for high-performance electric cars; and Vulcan Energy Resources, to track production and embedded carbon of lithium.

“We are on a mission to make the world’s most complex industrial supply chains more transparent, and help prevent the exploitation of people and our planet,” said Johnson-Poensgen.

An example mineral traced by Circulor’s platform is tantalum, a mineral widely used for building consumer electronics. Tantalum is often sourced from many regions of the world where its sale could be used to perpetuate fighting and thus it’s considered a “conflict mineral” and regulated. With proper supply chain traceability, automotive manufacturers could avoid buying from suppliers who source from such regions.

Blockchain technology has been put to use by numerous platforms including Open Mineral and ConsenSys, De Beers and TradeWind Markets Inc. for minerals and diamonds in order to track supply chains to help avoid this sort of exploitation. It’s even been used to avoid similar slave labor for chocolate by the company Topl using Right Origins.

Photo: Pixabay