AI sustainability, risk and compliance platform Prewave has raised €63 million in its Series B funding round, bring this compay's funding to over €90 million.
Supply chain disruptions — from natural disasters to labour issues — have long posed significant operational challenges for businesses.
Adding to this, growing geopolitical instability, workforce shortages and inflationary pressures have dramatically heightened supply chain risk in recent years, with disruptions estimated to cost businesses 6-10 per cent of their annual revenue.
Further businesses face a wave of new sustainability and supply chain regulations, each imposing complex reporting and compliance requirements, along with potentially crippling penalties for breaches.
For example, the EU’s Deforestation Regulation (EUDR), effective as of 2025, will introduce strenuous reporting requirements on businesses trading commodities or products usually related to deforestation from the EU.
The EU’s Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CS3D) will usher in a substantial set of new rules that aim to foster sustainable and responsible corporate behaviour in companies’ operations and across their global value chains.
Prewave uses AI to deliver supply chain superintelligence that can transform businesses’ supply chains to become more transparent, compliant and resilient.
It identifies and helps businesses manage 140 risk types globally. These include issues that affect resilience and cause disruption (natural disasters, financial stress, cyber risks, accidents, and legal issues), risks around sustainability and ESG, and compliance with a growing number of national and international regulations.
The platform automatically maps, scores and monitors millions of supply chain nodes.
Built on a decade of R&D and data training, Prewave’s academic-bred AI engine accurately identifies risk signals from vast and fragmented data sets made up of news and social media content across 400+ languages; company certifications and annual reports; government and NGO data feeds; and sanction and Politically Exposed Persons (PEP) lists.
Prewave then generates real-time predictive and reactive alerts, along with recommended actions for customers’ supply chains, risky suppliers, and sub-tier networks.
By integrating all supply chain risk use cases and enabling effective end-to-end risk management throughout the lifecycle (including identification, tier-n mapping, prioritisation, mitigation, and reporting and control), Prewave reduces businesses’ workload by a factor of 40 compared to manual, questionnaire-based compliance approaches.
Prewave has expanded rapidly on the back of strong demand across Europe, achieving 3x annual revenue growth in 2023.
Over 200 companies, including Lufthansa, Toyota, Ferrari and Dr Oetker, already rely on Prewave to remain compliant and enhance the resilience and sustainability of their supply chains.
Commenting, Harald Nitschinger, co-founder and Managing Director at Prewave, said:
“We founded Prewave because we are convinced that data and AI can play a major role in making supply chains more transparent, resilient and sustainable - and help to power the vital currents of global economic progress. We believe that in the face of rapidly accelerating regulatory complexity, businesses shouldn’t be aiming to take a tick-box approach, but to use regulatory compliance as a vehicle to become more resilient.”
Hedosophia led the funding, which was joined by existing investors Creandum, Ventech, Kompas, Speedinvest, and Working Capital Fund.
Sabina Wizander, Partner at Creandum, said:
"We saw during the pandemic how vulnerable global supply chains can be. Full supply chain visibility is a top C-suite priority especially given expanding regulations, geopolitical instability and climate change.
Prewave has the best product to meet this business need, shown by the traction it is getting with customers. They have strong momentum and this new investment is going to help turbocharge their growth.”
The new funding will drive Prewave’s next phase of global growth and to support further product R&D on its proprietary AI technology to deliver the world’s only supply chain superintelligence platform.
Lead image: Prewave. Photo: uncredited.
Would you like to write the first comment?
Login to post comments