Interos raises $100 million to protect supply chains from physical and cyber disruption, child labour and other ESG issues

Interos, the supply chain risk management and operational resilience technology company, has announced Series C financing of $100 million led by NightDragon.

Current investors, including Kleiner Perkins and Venrock, are also participating. This financing brings Interos’ valuation to over $1 billion, and establishes the company as a unicorn. 

Female-led unicorns are extremely rare

Interos, led by CEO Jennifer Bisceglie, becomes one of the few female-led unicorns. According to Crunchbase, “Female founder-CEOs run only 4 percent of the ‘unicorn’ startups valued at more than $1 billion. Which means that, proportionally, these successful venture-backed female founders are even more rare than female Fortune 500 CEOs, who currently run 7.4 percent of the country’s largest companies.”

Global supply chain severely strained impacting both businesses and consumers

The new funding will help Interos accelerate its business at a time when supply chain vulnerabilities are front and centre for companies around the world, following major supply chain shortages due to the pandemic and cyberattacks on organisations like SolarWinds, Kaseya and Colonial Pipeline that put company operations at risk. A severely strained global supply chain is translating to consumers as countless product shortages and to businesses as heavy bottom line and reputational impacts. The Interos Annual Global Supply Chain Report recently revealed that supply chain disruptions cost large companies, on average, $184 million a year, and 83 percent have suffered reputational damage.

Interos protects global supply chains from disruption

An early warning system to identify developing disruptions and supplier problems in real-time is critical to driving business operational resilience, macro-economic growth, public safety and national security. Numerous Fortune 500 brands, the U.S. Department of Defense, and NASA are using Interos’ artificial intelligence and machine learning-based cloud platform, which serves as this early warning system. The platform allows customers to instantly map their global supply chains to the Nth tier, continuously monitor those suppliers, flag supplier problems in real-time, and model ripple effects so problems can be quickly resolved before disruption occurs.

Interos proactively reveals physical, cyber and ESG-related supply chain risks

The recently updated Interos platform monitors for both physical and digital supply chain issues across dozens of risk categories, including financial, operational, governance, geographic, and cyber factors. The platform also monitors ESG-related risk factors, such as unethical labour practices and greenhouse gas emissions. The U.S. SEC is developing new ESG reporting requirements for public companies, but this type of risk is currently a major, but unnecessary, blind spot for organisations.

Supply chain risk now a board imperative

Global supply chain risk has become a board-level imperative with 78 percent of respondents to the Interos survey reporting their boards now confer on this topic at least once per month. While 39 percent say supply chain risk is their business’ current top priority, 50 percent say it will be in two years.

“COVID-19 and other macro and digital supply chain disruptions over the past year have caused boards of directors and other leaders to awaken to the tremendous impact supply chain disruptions can have on operational resilience, business performance and reputation,” said Jennifer Bisceglie, CEO of Interos. “Manual and annual supply chain risk monitoring is urgently moving to automated and continuous, and that can only be accomplished through AI/ML-based technology. This funding will allow us to accelerate our mission of helping organisations fix supply chain issues before they cause operational disruption.”

Interos experiencing explosive growth

Interos has logged a compound annual growth rate of 303 percent in the last two years. It notched a 104 percent increase in its annual recurring revenue in 2020 over the previous year and recorded 132 percent growth in the number of employees over the same period.

“Over the past year, we have seen that supply chain risk represents one of the biggest gaps for cybersecurity and business resiliency in history,” said Dave DeWalt, Founder and Managing Director, NightDragon. “We are proud to partner with Interos to accelerate their business and help companies around the world close the gap when it comes to supply chain risk.”