2024 Global Climate Challenge
Automated End-to-end Supply Chain Traceability + Sustainability and Risk Metrics tracking
What is the name of your solution?
Automated End-to-end Supply Chain Traceability + Sustainability and Risk Metrics tracking
Provide a one-line summary of your solution.
We automate supply chain transparency for corporations with complex, multi-tiered supply chain using AI.
In what city, town, or region is your solution team headquartered?
Washington D.C., DC, USAIn what country is your solution team headquartered?
What type of organization is your solution team?
For-profit, including B-Corp or similar models
What specific problem are you solving?
Map-Collective provides software toolkits to corporations and governments’ sustainability teams to help automatically trace, forecast, and manage Greenhouse Gas emissions, Supply Chain Risk, and Biodiversity Risk.
These teams are small and overburdened as they are required to survey each supplier to find data in order to meet the data requirements of current regulations. This is a costly and time consuming process for both the organization and their suppliers, and has to be repeated annually.
While there are some non-survey based platforms on the market, many multi-national corporations do not use them because of large data gaps. S&P PIERS and Altana AI use only bill of lading data, which only covers about 40% of international trade, not even touching on intra-continental movements.
Further, planning out transition plans implementations is a still more complex and time consuming process.
What is your solution?
Rather than use a survey-based software that gives them unverified, estimated, annual data at best, we offer an automated, data-driven supply chain transparency tool with data as recent as 10 days prior on their supply chain. And, as opposed to bill of lading-only solutions, we integrate bill of lading data with other sources such as lidar, satellite, and ioT data, so we don't have to rely on just one type of data which is incomplete and leaves many gaps. We have developed a patent-pending data structuring and analysis backend to aggregate and clean data in our model, enabling AI-driven automation in our toolkits, and we work with acclaimed researchers globally to actively improve upon methodologies for greater data coverage and accuracy.
Our platform integrates different data types to fill data gaps, and to create an auditable system for easily managing and reporting emissions, and allows for easy decarbonization planning through our AI-powered action planner, suggesting advantageous cost-cutting and carbon-cutting projects for a net positive impact on the environment and bottom line.
Many corporations with complex supply chains, such as Tata Motors, do not have this type of data at all today, and are greenfield customers for us. Tata has been surveying unwilling suppliers to try to pry supply chain transparency out of them, and solutions that offer this type of survey-based system are not helping them. We are able to offer them a much more efficient and effective alternative to get better component visibility worldwide, making their supply chain more resilient and sustainable as a result.
Who does your solution serve, and in what ways will the solution impact their lives?
Our target sectors are automotive companies' supply chain teams, and consumer goods and food and beverage supply chain teams.
Our integrated traceability discovery and reporting tools help these teams make better supply chain choices, which reflect all the way down to the beginning of the supply chain, impacting farmers, mine workers, and others involved in the raw material stage of the supply chain by helping corporations at all levels engage with them fairly.
Supply chain transparency not only helps corporations meet regulatory needs and ensure access to supplies for their products, it also creates visibility that is essential for workers in their supply chain to be treated fairly, and for resources to be used sustainably.
How are you and your team well-positioned to deliver this solution?
Our management team has vision, relevant expertise, and works well together.
CEO, Founder Tara Gupta, with an MBA from Georgetown, and a background in data visualisation, leads the business strategy and vision for the company. Her design thinking background from a BFA at RISD provides her with a community-driven, iterative lens to business. Her grandmother worked with day laborers in india, to try to educate the kids who were working on brick laying rather than going to school in Delhi. She has raised money for this cause, and keeps the cause of fair labor close to her heart. She has also worked on farms, in the first leg of the food journey, in Providence, West Virginia, and Panama, and thinks critically about our food systems in her work.
SVP Piyush Gambhir, with a MS from Duke Nicholas school of the environment, leads key sustainability research and partnerships, and brings his IT background to work while researching datasets for the platform. He investigates the data that helps bring workers at different stages of the supply chain to light.
CTO Issac Hicks is an AI whiz, and a software architecture innovator. Growing up on a Native American reservation, Issac is deeply connected with the need and motivation to preserve earth resources.
SVP Jugal Shah is a Georgetown MBA as well and has 10 years of experience in relationship-based sales in the supply chain and ESG space, connecting well with the corporations we are working with.
Which dimension of the Challenge does your solution most closely address?
Enable a low-carbon and nutritious global food system, across large and small-scale producers plus supply chains that reduce food loss.Which of the UN Sustainable Development Goals does your solution address?
What is your solution’s stage of development?
PilotWhy are you applying to Solve?
We are in a product validation and scale up stage which is critical to the success of the business. I believe that the solver community could help us navigate some of the essential challenges we are facing during this time. We have several goals in the upcoming time period that Solve could help us pursue, including sourcing a talented board of advisors, developing a media and pr strategy, and securing growth capital to scale up implementations with our initial customer base to others in these sectors.
In which of the following areas do you most need partners or support?
Who is the Team Lead for your solution?
Tara Gupta
What makes your solution innovative?
As opposed to other supply chain traceability solutions like Transparency-One or Sourcemap who offer survey-based supply chain discovery, we automate supply chain traceability.
And as opposed to other data mining solutions like S&P PIERS and Altana AI (bill of lading solutions), we integrate bill of lading data with other sources such as lidar, satellite, and ioT data, so we don't have to rely on just one type of data which is incomplete and leaves many gaps.
Our solution integrates both the data finding function, and the data analysis function. We offer supply chain transparency, automated, and correlated climate transition planning through data mining, with integrated operational decision making tools for companies to use to take action.
We have developed a patent-pending data structuring and analysis backend to aggregate and clean data in our model, enabling AI-driven automation in our toolkits, and we work with acclaimed researchers globally to actively improve upon methodologies for greater data coverage and accuracy.
Describe in simple terms how and why you expect your solution to have an impact on the problem.
- More efficient supply chain transparency system and integrated automated sustainability and risk metrics tracking system --->
- Corporations having access to more suppliers, including small scale suppliers, and being able to compare them on all levels, from cost to fair labor practices, to sustainability --->
- Regulators requiring corporations to make choices on sustainable suppliers (e.g. EU Deforestation regulation, CSRD, EU Digital Product Passports coming 2025) --->
- Corporations using supply chain transparency & integrated procurement solution on Mapcollective.com to reorganize their supply chain --->
- Corporations see benefits of implementations, such as marketing advantages, greater efficiencies, more predictable crops and supply, ability to mitigate risk and respond quickly in case of the need for supply chain agility --->
- Better access to resources and products for consumers, informed by sustainability and fair work practices -->
- Better labor conditions worldwide, greater opportunity
What are your impact goals for your solution and how are you measuring your progress towards them?
Our indicators include:
- improvement on data accuracy and data coverage (two separate indicators) of our supply chain data from our nearest competitor and in relation to global economy
- Tonnes of carbon avoided, and tonnes of carbon actively removed/drawn down from atmosphere, and where we stand in terms of global atmospheric carbon in relation to the planetary boundaries 'safe operating zone'
- # of suppliers mapped on our procurement portal across various nations (inclusivity of small farmers, small operations in our big data process)
Describe the core technology that powers your solution.
We are powered by big data (data mining) and AI (agentic model that informs our central database on what it should pull, and why, and where to put it, and how to cross check it against other data).
We also are developing a Tangle/IOTA protocol system for hosting our data, to encrypt and decentralize it.
Which of the following categories best describes your solution?
A new application of an existing technology
Please select the technologies currently used in your solution:
If your solution has a website or an app, provide the links here:
https://www.mapcollective.com/
In which countries do you currently operate?
Which, if any, additional countries will you be operating in within the next year?
How many people work on your solution team?
3 full time: Tara Gupta, Piyush Gambir, Jugal Shah
2 on contractor team: Issac Hicks, Deep
2 contract designers: Kevin Kedroe, Noelle Barnes
4 interns: rotating
How long have you been working on your solution?
Tara Gupta has been working full time on this solution since it was founded in January 2020. Piyush joined in 2022. Jugal Shah and Issac Hicks joined in 2023.
Tell us about how you ensure that your team is diverse, minimizes barriers to opportunity for staff, and provides a welcoming and inclusive environment for all team members.
Our team is all immigrants and minorities. Our two designers are black, our CTO is native american, as CEO I am a indian american woman with a disability, and my two SVPs are immigrants from India on Visa, and some of our interns are east asian and white. Our personnel ranges from 20s to 40s. Some of our advisors bring us age diversity, in their 50s and 60s.
I proactively look for women, diverse coders or data science persons, or others who can bring another lens to our team when hiring. When we feel that we are missing a certain population's voice in our design or build out process, we consult external advisors.
The process of inclusion by active effort creates an environment of continuous growth and challenge. It is essential to creating a successful, well rounded business that can comfortably operate in today's world.
What is your business model?
Our product is offered as several toolkits, each with a Map view, metrics tracker, forecaster, action planner, and reporter, such as can be seen in our GHG emissions toolkit and our procurement toolkit. Our supply chain transparency tool is unique in having a map view, metrics tracker, and flow view (tree map). Customers monitor their organization, relevant assets, products, and upstream supply chain partners through their dashboards.
We operate on a SAAS model, with monthly or yearly subscriptions available for our toolkits at 3 levels. Currently we offer a 25k package, a 70k package, and a 150k package. We plan to try to bring these prices down as we scale up.
With an estimated revenue of $20.24 billion in 2022, supply chain management (SCM) is the fastest growing market in the Gartner enterprise application software segment (https://www.gartner.com/en/digital-markets/insights/software-market-insights-logistics-and-supply-chain-management-scm). Our total market size is about 30B, consisting of SCM, nature-tech, carbon accounting, and procurement software segments.
Do you primarily provide products or services directly to individuals, to other organizations, or to the government?
Organizations (B2B)What is your plan for becoming financially sustainable, and what evidence can you provide that this plan has been successful so far?
As of 2023, we had worked with about 6 customers on contracts and pilots, including the County of Maui and CVS, gaining revenues of 644k.
We are now expanding rapidly into big names in the Auto and Consumer goods spaces, with pilot-to-contract vehicles and direct contract engagements.
We are targeting $2M in revenue this year with our supply chain traceability toolkit, automated ghg emissions toolkit including automated scope 3, and procurement insights toolkit. We have interest from Nissan, Ford, Tata Motors, Panasonic, Unilever, and more.
After our Q2 or Q3 closes out, we plan to go out to VC funders with a proposal for our seed round. We have a couple interested parties who have reached out to us already.
Solution Team
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Tara Gupta Founder, CEO, Map Collective Inc
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Our Organization
Map-Collective Inc