Paradata, a SaaS startup bringing much-needed transparency to the supply chain industry, is nearing completion of a $10 million Series A1 funding to scale its cloud-based platform, enabling faster, smarter procurement and sourcing decisions. This latest investment will fuel strategic growth while furthering Paradata's use of machine learning and expert systems to give manufacturers, distributors and suppliers real-time insights into part and component costs, compliance, lead time and other go-to-market risks.

SAP.iO has joined this latest funding round led by existing investors Richmond Global and PivotNorth. "This new funding, and backing by SAP.iO, will accelerate our rapid growth trajectory," said Debbra Rogers, CEO of Paradata. "We want to be the Google of the supply chain industry-empowering manufacturers to look up any component or part across their entire supply chain ecosystem and quickly find the single source of truth."

Maximizing Cost Savings, Minimizing Risk
Historically, manufacturers have struggled to attain end-to-end supply chain visibility as 80 percent of the data needed to successfully manage global supply chains exists outside their organizations. Paradata solves this problem by ingesting 100 percent of the data and then, using machine learning, identifies and monitors the most relevant details and actions for lowering costs and improving supply chain health. On average, Paradata's customers have reduced Bill of Materials (BOM) costs by more than five percent, which translates into hundreds of thousands and up to millions of dollars in total product cost savings.

Paradata accomplishes this by continuously harvesting terabytes of structured and unstructured data about components and parts from hundreds of public and private sources. Once customers upload their BOM into its big data platform, Paradata's "trusted discovery" engine then automatically harmonizes, cleans, corrects and classifies the data by part type or category. Approximately 100 attributes are applied to determine a part's exact "fingerprint or DNA."

The resulting set of parts with the same fingerprints can be swapped out for one another based on parameters, such as cost, lead time, compliance, etc. Paradata's dataset of "golden data" expands continuously and opportunistically to drive predictive and prescriptive analytics as well as produce authenticated, meaningful supply chain insights in minutes.

Democratizing Supply Chains
Paradata's data-first approach creates a level playing field for companies across the entire manufacturing ecosystem, so an OEM with five people managing their product lifecycle can compete just as effectively as a world-class manufacturer with a 1,000-person sourcing and procurement team. "We are pleased to invest in Paradata as their big data solution is poised to provide transparency throughout the supply chain across industries," said Ram Jambunathan, managing director, SAP.iO Fund. "Not only will Paradata change how supply chains run, they will enable manufacturers of all sizes to transform their businesses and collaborate in new and powerful ways."

For Ember, a technology startup that is revolutionizing the way people eat and drink, transparent access to vital supply chain data is proving invaluable to scaling its manufacturing operations. In November 2016, Ember released the world's first temperature control mug, which is available online and at select Starbucks locations. After selling through their inventory in a few weeks, Ember needed to work fast to fulfill pent-up customer demand.

With Paradata's platform, Ember's supply chain team quickly understood the cost impact of making more Ember mugs, each containing over a hundred parts. Moreover, Ember received proactive recommendations for swapping out parts nearing end of life. "Paradata empowered us to move fast and make smart supply chain and product design decisions to fuel our next phase of business growth," said Kevin Scanlon, VP of Supply Chain at Ember. "Thanks to Paradata, we have confidence in our supply chain costs, which lets us focus on what we do best: develop innovative, temperature control products."

Paradata is helping an ever-increasing roster of customers reap greater value from their supply chains, including Adtran, Aerohive Networks, Juniper Networks, Palo Alto Networks, Pure Storage and Teledyne/Lecroy Inc.

About Paradata

Paradata brings transparency to the supply chain industry with its unique data-first, Software as a Service (SaaS) that uses machine learning to provide authenticated, accurate product details to Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) and Electronic Manufacturing Services (EMS) providers as well as parts distributors and suppliers. Based in San Jose, Calif., the company is democratizing the supply chain industry by enabling manufacturers of all sizes to measure and monitor the most relevant details, actions and updates needed to lower costs and improve supply chain health. With its predictive and prescriptive optimization algorithms, Paradata empowers manufacturing, engineering, supply chain and procurement leaders to make faster, smarter product design and sourcing decisions. For more information, visit www.paradata.io.