5.4.22-Startup-Ecosystem-Sourcemap

LEONARDO BONANNI: Hi, everyone. I'm Leo. I'm the [AUDIO OUT] Sourcemap. Sourcemap is a company I founded out of the MIT Media Lab in 2011. It was to bring the power of knowing what is in your supply chain to companies all over the world.

And it was just a little early to market why do companies want to map their supply chains and know where things come from. Well, if you have issues, standards, goals around, how workers are treated, how the environment is treated, how communities thrive. Those are reasons, but there are also some new reasons that emerged in 2021. Which is namely, if you want to import your goods into the US from 55 different countries, or if you want to comply with the coming new EU Green Deal.

All of these laws that have just come onto the books have, in fact, required supply chain mapping down to the raw materials as part of the condition for being able to import dozens of different finished goods and commodities. We work with a number of very well-known brands, not just to comply with standards, but actually to set standards. I like to think of it as the age of advocacy in corporations.

Going beyond sustainability, to actually take a stand and go out into the world to raise standards and effectively make the competition run after them. If you wear clothing or you eat food, then the chances are that those brands are using Sourcemap to map their raw materials. It shouldn't just be clothing and food though, because these regulations also apply to manufacturing, automotive, aerospace, semiconductors, renewables, and a slew of other industries that we are just starting to get into.

How does it work? Sourcemap is a software as a service that automates the process of collecting the vast amounts of data from your supply chain that you need in order to map the raw materials. We're talking about hundreds of thousands of supplier sites in the typical supply chain of a multinational corporation. We're talking about 5 to 10 tiers, and we're talking about gigabytes, if not sometimes terabytes of supporting documentation.

This is just one example of how our software as a service automated the process of tracing leather for one of the major US footwear companies down to the slaughterhouses in Brazil, overlaid with all sorts of real time data that we can capture. Not just sanctions lists, risk heat maps, but also in this case, what you're seeing in red are real time satellite imagery detecting deforestation as it happens. And so while you're mapping your supply chain, you can at the same time validate it.

There's a lot of reasons why this is useful. In that particular case, the data you saw there drove a boycott that had-- that forced Bolsonaro to put a moratorium on burning in the Amazon within less than a day. But if you think about it from the point of view of our customer, what it really bought them was the chance to find an alternate source of supply before they announced this and all of their competitors were sent scrambling for those alternate sources of supplies. So we're really buying time and making an impact.

It's not just about avoiding risk, it's not just about complying with regulations, it's also about building a trust based relationship with customers, with consumers and with your supply chain. This is just an example of one of the leading US consumer fashion brands that every year publishes the supply chain behind their products, down to the raw materials. Hundreds of nodes for each product, dozens of flagship products for each brand, and more than a dozen brands.

This is going way beyond making sure that your supply chain is up to snuff and legally allowed to operate. This is saying to your consumers, you can trust me, I've taken care to implement standards in the supply chain that go far beyond the competition. If you're a B2C company, it's obvious that this is the kind of image you want your consumers to have of you.

If you're a B2B company it actually matters even more because you're entering a very competitive marketplace and selling to very sophisticated buyers, and if you can bring to them information that shows that your supply chain is more resilient, more robust, less risky, then you have a chance of moving a lot more volume. And so that's who we're looking to work with. If you are on the consumer facing side and you want to build a trust based relationship with consumers, if you're on the B2B side and you want to ensure your customers that your supply chain is more robust than anyone's then please come see me. I'll be giving demos out in the lunch room. Thank you.

[AUDIENCE CLAPPING]