• Altana Technologies is mapping global supply chains as Google Maps does the world.
  • It wants to offer a shared source of truth so buyers can be sure where their stuff comes from.
  • Check out the nine-page pitch deck used to raise a $100 million Series B round.

Altana CEO Evan Smith is building a new version of “Google Maps,” but his 5-year-old startup has nothing to do with routes or directions. It’s all about global supply chains.

“What if there was one canonical model for this bottom-up view of the world supply chain, and all the products flowing places and companies?” Smith told Insider.

Smith and his cofounders were leaders in Panjiva, a company specializing in trade data and intelligence that sold to S&P in 2018. There, they sold supply-chain data but didn’t translate it into any deeper meaning, Smith told Insider last year. Altana wants to absorb supply-chain data — the buying, selling, and moving of materials, parts, and finished goods — and use software to spit out a central source of truth for supply chains.

It’s a big idea, and Smith quickly realized the data he needed was at the transaction level — the receipts of global commerce. The problem is that this is sensitive data companies closely guard. Altana needs to be the Switzerland of supply-chain data, he said.

“We somehow needed ‘data Switzerland’ that’s like this neutral thing that everything can connect to and then benefit from,” Smith told Insider. The mechanism to become a “Swiss” tech company has led to technological and legal innovations that allow Altana to view and synthesize a version of private corporate data without actually taking ownership of it.

Altana’s machine-learning algorithms then use the “maps” of the global supply chain to calculate risk inherent in business decisions, verify sustainability claims about raw ingredients in consumer products, or someday even speed up customs clearance by days or weeks.

“No big apparel brand, retailer, or solar manufacturer is going to Xinjiang, China, and buying directly from forced-labor camps,” Smith said, adding that supply-chain opacity meant many companies were buying such products without knowing it. “We put them in our map of the world, and then suddenly, they can see their connections to Xinjiang.”

As with Google Maps, there’s a long path to make Altana work everywhere for every customer — a fact of which Smith is painfully aware.

“We had to spend millions and millions of dollars on data on R&D, on infrastructure, just to get the whole data platform going and typically get into business. And that took us three years,” he said, describing the path for Altana as closer to Tesla or SpaceX than the typical enterprise-software startup.

The company raised $22 million across two rounds in 2020 and 2021, and then $100 million in 2022 led by Activate Capital. OMERS Ventures also participated, alongside the strategic investors Prologis Ventures, Reefknot Investments, and Four More Capital. The existing investors GV (formerly Google Ventures), Amadeus Capital Partners, Floating Point, and Ridgeline Partners also joined the round.

In 2022, the sizeable raise was an anomaly.

“Most Series B’s just aren’t getting done, period,” Smith said. “And then big Series B’s are just extremely rare.”

Venture-capital deals for supply-chain startups were down 71.% in value from the previous year in the fourth quarter of 2022 , according to PitchBook. 

Since the 2022 raise, Altana has hired a marketing head from Slack and several other high-placed executives. Smith told Insider he planned to build up to 140 employees this year. 

 Here’s the pitch deck that has gotten Altana this far. 

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