Working Capital is thrilled to announce its investment in Phylagen’s $14 million Series A financing, alongside Cultivian Sandbox and Breakout Ventures. The San Francisco-based data analytics company is building the world’s largest environmental microbiome database, and revolutionizing the way products are traced through their supply chains.
The opacity and complexity of global supply chains pose an enormous challenge to companies as they try to enforce labor standards across their supply chain. Compounding these problems is the practice of unauthorized subcontracting – in which a contracted supplier sells a buyer goods that were actually produced by an unauthorized third party – making it very difficult to detect exactly where and how a product originates.
Phylagen has developed a microbiome analytics platform to address these challenges, empowering stakeholders to trace goods and materials to exact locations of origin such as specific factories, farms or warehouses. Each place and object on Earth has thousands of naturally-occurring invisible microbes. The genetic information encoded in these microbes creates unique “fingerprints” for everything in the world, from food, to textiles, to both legitimate and counterfeit goods.
Working Capital strongly believes that transparency is an important first step to ensure the ethical treatment of workers. Phylagen’s technology provides novel insights for brands and organizations who need to access essential information about the origins of products. We are very excited to be joining Phylagen’s journey as they pioneer the new frontier in supply chain traceability and transparency.
Read an excellent profile of Phylagen in Fast Company.