Altana is mapping out its path to the future.
The value chain management platform announced Monday it had raised a $200 million Series C round, which comes less than two years after it raised a $100 million Series B round.
With this new infusion of funding, Altana has also reached unicorn status, stating that its valuation has increased to $1 billion.
The U.S. Innovative Technology Fund (USIT) led the round, with further participation from new investors March Capital, Generation Investment Management, Salesforce Ventures and Friends and Family Capital. Existing investors who re-upped their support included Google Ventures (GV), Activate Capital, Floating Point and Omers Ventures.
Evan Smith, the company’s co-founder and CEO, said he had planned to raise a Series C later this year. But before he began working with existing investors, he said, USIT came to the company with a preemptive offer.
Altana, which uses artificial intelligence to show customers a “shared source of truth” about their value chains, has active partnerships with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the U.S. Department of Defense, the UK government, the Australian government and more, in addition to its clients in the private sector. The firm took interest in Altana because of its connection to the public sector, Smith said.
“[USIT] said… ‘We think we can accelerate [the public sector] part of your business. And we believe that, if Altana becomes the system of record on supply chains for governments, then all these private sector use cases and product applications will follow,’” Smith said.
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From there, the Series C round began. Today, Smith said about half of Altana’s clients are in the public sector, while the other half, like Maersk and L.L. Bean, are in the private sector. With the upgrades the team plans to make, Smith estimates that will soon shift to primarily private sector partnerships, “because the total addressable market is so big.”
Smith and his team plan to allocate the vast majority of the $200 million to new product development. Altana has plans for a variety of new use cases; to build them, Smith said, he plans to double the size of the team by next year.
Smith noted the capital will enable Altana to refine its existing products, which have already come a long way between the Series B round and the Series C round.
In the past two years, he said, the company has transformed its primary service. It started by building intelligent supply chain maps, which allowed customers to look at their value chains and risk from above. Today, though, Altana has become a workflow product that allows customers to directly interact with their supply chain if risks or issues arise.
In further refining Altana’s core product, the company will race toward the goal of becoming what Smith called “the one-stop-shop on value chain compliance.” That would give customers stronger abilities to map and manage supply chains based on emerging and changing regulations like the EU’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD), the U.S.’s Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA) and more.
In addition to the continued transformation of Altana’s core offerings, Smith plans to introduce products that those in sourcing and procurement might find particularly useful.
The first of two tools he expects to launch will give those professionals greater visibility into the entire value chain, before they sign up to partner with any supplier.
“Right now, you engage a supplier, and you inherit the value chain behind them. What if you could search for new suppliers, qualify them, screen them and then simulate and design multi-tier global value chains that optimize for Free Trade Agreement eligibility or landed costs or geopolitical resilience? That’s where we’re going,” Smith explained.
The company also plans to allow its customers to dip into the value chains they work with on the daily.
“We’re building is a control tower view, [so] that they can monitor the value chain and then reach in and collaborate with them—I want to not only talk to my Tier 1 [supplier], but I need to talk to my Tier 2 and Tier 3 [suppliers] on this issue, [too],” he said, noting that use cases for that kind of technology could range from Scope 3 emissions questions to forced labor concerns.
As the company and its offerings continue to grow, Smith said it will increase its focus on selling into the Asia-Pacific region and continental Europe while continuing to expand in its two strongest markets: the U.S. and the UK. Smith expects the generalized retail, apparel, consumer packaged goods and automotive industries to provide the company further growth.
Smith said he feels the pool of investors backing the company for its Series C raise show the venture capital industry’s confidence in Altana’s potential.
“We’re trying to be the common operating picture between and among the public and private sectors,” he said. “We’ve got an investor mix that I honestly couldn’t be more thrilled about, because I think it genuinely reflects the priorities and the strategy of the company, and they’re going to be able to accelerate us.”