Start-up Interos wants to prevent delivery bottlenecks with an early warning system

Jennifer Bisceglie

With her AI start-up Interos, Jennifer Bisceglie became a unicorn entrepreneur.

(Photo: Interos)

Dusseldorf Jennifer Bisceglie’s business model has become indispensable for internationally networked companies – at least the CEO of the supply chain start-up Interos in Arlington, near Washington DC, is convinced of that. First the pandemic, then the sideways container ship in the Suez Canal and the ransomware attacks against powerful companies such as Colonial Pipeline or JBS Beef.

In the automotive, IT or food industries, incidents like these led to serious bottlenecks in the supply chain. “One event after the other happens, and companies are often not prepared,” explains the tech entrepreneur. With her technology, however, she can save companies high losses of money and, above all, damage to their reputation, she says.

On an interactive platform, Interos uses artificial intelligence to show where and with whom there are risks for deliveries worldwide. Bisceglie recently closed Series C financing with Interos and raised $ 100 million. Since then, Interos has been valued at more than $ 1 billion, making it unicorn.

According to Bisceglie, the platform works like an early warning system. A digital globe shows around 20 million companies on the platform. Artificial intelligence visualizes all connections of suppliers to a company and divides the associated risks into six factors: financial risks, cybersecurity, restrictions in a country, geopolitical risks, operational restrictions and corporate social responsibility (CSR).

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The funding round was led by Night Dragon, a venture capital firm that invests in later-stage startups in cybersecurity and privacy.

“Last year we saw that supply chain risk was one of the biggest cybersecurity and business resilience gaps in history,” said Dave DeWalt, managing director of Nightdragon. Scientist Marco Motta from the Fraunhofer Institute for Material Flow and Logistics (IML) also confirms: “Risk management has never been more relevant than it is today.”

Disrupted supply chains lead to severe business damage

A study by the Economist Intelligence Unit with 400 companies shows: Half of the pandemic was seriously damaging because of interrupted supply chains. A survey by the Herchenbach Supply Chain Institute with 142 companies also showed that 60 percent are not prepared for disruptive supply chains.

For Bisceglie, this means positive business figures: In the first Corona year, the Interos customer base grew threefold and in 2020 its sales doubled and stood at 15 million US dollars.

The start-up has almost 200 employees, more than twice as many as in the previous year. Customers include companies that the US magazine “Fortune” ranks among the 500 most important companies in the USA, the United States Department of Defense and NASA. In Germany, Interos also has a branch: In addition to the automotive and manufacturing sectors, customers come from the areas of finance, insurance and chemistry.

Interos platform

On the Interos platform, companies should be able to see which difficulties may be related to their delivery.

(Photo: Interos)

Interos collects the data for the early warning platform from around 85,000 sources and feeds it into the AI. Some of the sources are available free of charge on the Internet, some are information from news portals, or Interos buys data from companies. According to its own information, Interos processes around 250 million risk events per month.

Act faster with AI

Saskia Wagner-Sardesai, scientist at Fraunhofer IML, sees an advantage in the use of AI in risk management: “In Europe, the automotive industry was looking for replacement suppliers during the pandemic, but these were fully booked.” An AI could capture the entire network behind a delivery, also their customers.

Instead of traditionally making a lot of phone calls and setting up Excel tables when a risk arises, says Wagner-Sardesai, one can recognize risks early with AI and “reduce costs, gain options for action and ultimately deliver them to the end customer”.

In Germany there are similar start-ups such as Orbica or Supply On from Bavaria, which connect around 100,000 companies worldwide and offer solutions for optimized supply chains. Jennifer Bisceglie, meanwhile, has expansion plans: With the new investment, she wants to keep growing, improve the tech platform and AI and expand the customer base.

More: Despite dramatic bottlenecks: German companies are sticking to their supply chains

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