Opening Remarks
This week, I’ve been thinking about how much time founders spend perfecting their pitch, when the best investors should be doing the same.
Every great call isn’t just a founder pitching a VC. It’s a two-way pitch. The best funds don’t just evaluate deals, they convince founders why they should take their money.
Setting the Scene
Every company wants to be and look sustainable, but now, thanks to a wave of new global regulations, they’re actually required to prove it.
Today, companies find themselves tracing their products all the way back to the raw materials, often across five, six, or even seven tiers of suppliers.
However, supply chains are messy, global, and opaque, making data hard to find and forcing companies to rely on slow, expensive, and often inaccurate manual surveys.
This week’s company is building a platform that automates the entire traceability process using AI to autonomously investigate, validate, and connect the dots across massive supply chain networks.
In a Sentence
Map-Collective is an AI-powered traceability platform that verifies the source of every material in a company’s supply chain and delivers actionable insights.
AI Traceability: Multiple AI agents collect and cross-verify data from shipping records, ERP systems, satellite imagery, and public databases to build a complete supply chain graph.
Verifies: Companies can meet evolving regulations, ensure proof of origin, and protect their reputation.
Insights: The platform identifies weak points, regional dependencies, and procurement risks across the supply chain.
Bulleted Version: Map Collective is like a farm-to-table menu for your entire product, showing exactly where every ingredient, or in this case, every material and component, came from.
The Basics
Industry: Supply Chain Traceability, Compliance Intelligence
Headquarters: Washington, D.C.
Year Founded: 2020
Employee Count: 10
Investors: Angel investors; non-dilutive R&D grants from the National Science Foundation
Amount Raised: $2.35M total ($750K pre-seed + $1.6M non-dilutive grants)
Business Model: SaaS, pay-per-use
Early Traction: Pilots with defense organizations and an automotive manufacturer projecting millions in annual savings
Sponsored Content*
IN PARTNERSHIP WITH
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Weekly Feature Continued
Due Diligence
WHAT WE LIKE
Market Opportunity: New regulations are mandating companies to verify ethical, sustainable supply chains, driving a $330B+ market across traceability, logistics, and procurement tech.
Competitive Advantage: Map-Collective’s AI system provides 250% more supply chain coverage and 83% higher accuracy than competitors who rely on surveys or shipping receipts.
Data Flywheel: Every new customer expands Map Collective’s supplier graph, strengthening its data moat and unlocking richer insights for risk, emissions, ESG, and compliance.
POTENTIAL RISKS
Integration Complexity: By being sector agnostic, Map-Collective must integrate with diverse supplier systems, requiring significant engineering lift with each new data provider.
Data Dependence: Reliance on third-party data sources means disruptions or quality issues could impact insight accuracy and platform value.
Regulatory Acceptance: Similar to other compliance systems, future regulations may require manual review of AI-verified data, reducing Map Collective’s automation advantage and scalability.
Founder Profile
Tara Gupta, CEO: Four-time American Science Foundation Seed Fund awardee; Forbes 30 Under 30, AACC 40 Under 40.
Issac Hicks, CTO: Agentic AI expert; consulting at Accenture.
To request an introduction to the founder, respond to this email.
Comps
Transparency-One: Acquired by ISN; relies on suppliers filling out surveys , whereas Map-Collective replaces manual surveys with autonomous AI mapping.
Altana AI: Raised over $200M from US Innovative Technology, Floating Point, and others; Altana maps global trade using shipping data, while Map Collective adds IoT, satellite, and LiDAR to fill critical visibility gaps.
Interos: Raised $100M from Venrock, Kleiner Perkins, and others; provides supplier risk monitoring but lacks Map-Collective’s automated proof-of-origin down to the material level.
Why Map-Collective: By automating supply chain visibility down to the material level, while providing predictive and real-time intelligence, this company is charting a new course of how enterprises manage their supply chains.
Event Board
Foundersgiving, NYC: We’re hosting our second annual Foundersgiving, a Thanksgiving themed dinner to bring together NYC’s top founders in November! Sign up HERE.
Cast Your Vote
What do you think of Map-Collective?
Last Week Today
The Results Are In: Fandiem, a turnkey sweepstakes and auction platform for non-profits and artists, was favored in last week’s poll.
Subscriber Feedback: “Fandiem feels fresh and adds some fun to giving, but I’m not yet convinced artists are passionate enough about causes to actively seek out a platform like this.”
