Altana Technologies Inc., a startup that helps organizations fix regulatory compliance and reliability issues in their supply chains, has raised $200 million from investors.

The company announced the Series C round today. US Innovative Technology Fund led the raise with participation from Salesforce Ventures, Alphabet Inc.’s GV startup fund and a half-dozen other institutional investors. Altana is now valued at $1 billion.

“Altana is going after a global market that is expansive and growing,” members of Salesforce Ventures’ startup investment team wrote in a blog post today. “The supply chain management market is estimated to reach ~$45B by 2027.”

A large enterprise’s supply chain is susceptible to a wide range of risks. Some suppliers may be operating in breach of sanctions, labor laws or sustainability requirements. Others might have financial health challenges that don’t pose an immediate problem, but could hurt their ability to deliver merchandise reliably in the long term.

New York-based Altana offers a software platform that promises to help companies detect such issues. The platform ingests publicly available records and user-supplied data to create a map of an organization’s supply chain. From there, it uses artificial intelligence to flag potential problems.

Altana says that its platform spots not only problematic suppliers but also more subtle issues. The platform can, for example, point out if an enterprise relies on a single contract manufacturer for its entire supply of an important component. Sourcing merchandise from a single manufacturer can lead to shortages in the event that it experiences a factory disruption.

Altana provides a database of 500 million companies to help users find new suppliers. According to the company, its platform automates the process of filtering suppliers based on their compliance with regulatory compliance and business requirements. Before onboarding a new partner, companies can simulate its impact on their business operations to detect potential issues.

Insurers offer policies designed to help enterprises mitigate the financial impact of unexpected supply chain issues. The price of such policies depends on the likelihood that the problem they’re designed to mitigate will materialize. According to Altana, insurers can use its platform to measure the amount of risk in a company’s supply chain and set underwriting terms accordingly. 

Companies with more advanced requirements have the option to extend Altana’s feature set by building custom applications atop its platform. Moreover, they can use the supply chain data the software holds to train artificial intelligence models.

Altana counts shipping giant Mærsk A/S, Boston Scientific Corp. and other large enterprises among its customers along with multiple government agencies in the U.S. and UK. To further grow its market presence, the company will invest part of its new $200 million round into product development. The engineering effort will place a particular emphasis on expanding the AI features that Altana provides as part of its platform.

Photo: Unsplash