Supply chain management (SCM) software company Sourcemap is set to expand into Europe and, fueled by a $10 million venture capital injection, further develop its suite of software applications. benchmarking, traceability and supplier transparency to meet the growing demands of global enterprises that increasingly face complex compliance regulations and logistical disruptions.
In addition to recent concerns that the Russian invasion of Ukraine will further disrupt global supply chains disrupted by COVID, new labor and green energy laws – including European regulations that require companies to map their supply chains back to originating suppliers – have fueled demand for SCM software.
“Now is the right time to meet the market or scale and that is going to require additional resources across sales, marketing, R&D and other divisions,” said Leonardo Bonanni, Founder and CEO of Sourcemap.
Supply chain regulation is growing
In January 2021, the United States enacted the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, which prohibits goods made in whole or in part from materials sourced from China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. Additionally, new regulations around decarbonization, deforestation and forced labor are forcing large multinationals to implement transparency and traceability technology in many aspects of global supply chain operations, Bonanni said. The new European Green Deal which aims for the EU to become the first climate-neutral continent by 2050 will also help open up the market for business, he said.
Sourcemap was born out of a PhD project at the MIT Media Lab in 2008 as a portal designed to educate consumers about the origin of their products and their social and ecological impacts.
The company, which now claims to have more than 400,000 businesses mapped by its software – and offers apps tailored to businesses in industries such as agriculture, beauty, healthcare and jewelery – has transformed over the years into a cloud-based platform for SCM applications.
Sourcemap modeled on social networks
The platform, modeled on social networks, allows customers to add suppliers and subcontractors, and invite suppliers to validate data. The data collected by the platform is processed in the back-end to provide various information to customers.
“Sourcemap essentially provides a portal as a front end for its corporate clients to start inviting their vendors and in turn their vendors – this is in tiers and can reach thousands down to the actual source – to provide key details on how and where they are sourcing products or raw materials,” Bonanni said.
This data enables the provision of services such as supply chain visibility, risk optimization and integration into workflow automation in the same window after verifying details that suppliers and sub -contractors fulfill.
“Supply chain mapping often involves thousands of companies across five or more levels of supplier relationships, so we’ve developed a custom graphical database that allows customers to identify and record each provider, and collect as much data as they need to ensure the chain of custody is clean and compliant,” Bonanni said.
“Each Sourcemap customer has a virtual private cloud to securely manage and analyze their end-to-end supply chain data, hosted on a hybrid cloud (Amazon and Microsoft) for maximum resilience and compatibility with existing business systems,” according to Bonanni.
SCM software can be used to verify non-compliance
Sourcemap also claims that companies can use the platform to cross-check supplier data to exclude those with a history of non-compliance in any way. Many Sourcemap customers use data from the due diligence platform, collected by the front-end portal, to check whether they can meet their delivery deadlines, Bonanni said.
Although this puts the company in direct competition with companies such as SAP, IBM, Oracle and NetSuite – all vying for a share of the SCM software market – Bonanni said Sourcemap’s due diligence platform has API connections with SAP, Oracle and IBM databases which very large multinationals already use.
The SCM software market is growing rapidly
According to a report by Allied Market Research, the global digital supply chain market was valued at $3.91 billion in 2020 and is projected to reach $13.67 billion by 2030, growing at a CAGR (compound annual growth rate) of 13.2% from 2021 to 2030. .
Bonanni says Sourcemap’s platform’s ability to map vendors across multiple tiers for various materials in regions right out of the box is the key differentiator from other SCM software vendors.
A survey conducted by SCM software provider Blue Yonder shows that at least 67% of the 250 organizations surveyed believe the ability to view and manage their end-to-end supply chain will help them better manage disruptions related to pandemic. The survey further suggests that almost 97% of organizations have faced disruption in the past 12 months and 63% said supply chain has become a priority.
Sourcemap said it offers its due diligence platform and other services through licenses that can be scaled up or down based on customer needs, consistent with other enterprise SaaS platforms.
The planned expansion in Europe is the result of a $10 million injection into the company by Energize Ventures – a venture capital firm that focuses on growth-stage venture capital and MIT’s E14 fund. . In 2011, the company raised an undisclosed amount in a non-equity transaction with the MIT Media Lab and E14 fund.
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