The AI supply chain startup Altana was formed in early 2019 around a forecast of global chaos. As part of an early exercise, the three co-founders each traced out what they thought trade would look like in the next few years.

“We all wrote some version of, like, the world is gonna fall apart,” CEO and co-founder Evan Smith told us, specifically recalling predictions of more trade wars spurred by the economic rise of China, climate dislocation, and sovereign debt crises.

Seven years later, chaos has become the norm. Soon after Altana’s founding, the coronavirus pandemic ramped up a period of global trade turbulence that hasn’t eased much since. More recently, whack-a-mole tariffs and war in the Middle East have roiled the globe-spanning trade routes on which many retailers rely.

Altana aims to help businesses, logistics providers, and governments navigate these uncertainties. The company runs a data platform that shows the operating facilities and ownership of companies and the flow of goods between them, according to Smith.

“You actually get to see this living, breathing, bottoms-up view of raw materials coming out of the earth and then being transformed into components, and then turning into, like, an iPhone,” Smith said.

On top of that Google Maps-like display, clients ranging from L.L. Bean and Skims to shipping giant Maersk and US Customs and Border Protection can use analytics dashboards, predictive AI, and other digital tools to manage their supply chain networks. Altana also claims to offer more visibility into a “genealogy of the goods,” from subcomponents to “sub sub subcomponents, the raw materials,” Smith said. The startup had raised $344 million at a nearly $1.3 billion valuation as of last August, according to PitchBook data.

“The big headline bet we’ve made over the last 18 months is in automating all cross-border trade functions for all three of those parties. So in the government case, you’re trying to enforce the law. In the enterprise case, you’re trying to comply with the law. And the logistics provider, we’re trying to facilitate that whole network,” Smith told us at Altana’s Brooklyn headquarters. “And we have a ton of AI workflows, agents that are doing all three of those jobs in a connected, collective network.”

Read more.—PK

Before Elizabeth Holmes was convicted of defrauding investors at Theranos, she was celebrated by many in her role as the face of health-tech innovation in Silicon Valley. Holmes is a case study of what happens when a founder’s identity becomes inseparable from their company.

When that line blurs, the risks of a person are shared by their company. Like Holmes, well-known tech founders like Elon Musk and Sam Altman are often talked about—and criticized—for their larger-than-life personas, which can inadvertently wreak havoc on the businesses they built.

A survey by the National Bureau of Economic Research shows that 95% of VCs consider the founding team an important factor in investment decisions, underscoring how much a founder’s identity and leadership weigh in funding outcomes.

What happens when the visibility that drives early success begins to strain teams, slows decision-making, and complicates scaling?

Markus Baer, a professor of organizational behavior at the Olin Business School at Washington University in St. Louis, says the dynamic of startups being so closely linked with a founder’s identity is rooted in uncertainty: “The saying in entrepreneurship is ‘You’re betting on the jockey, not the horse.’ Confidence in a founder can attract attention, secure funding, and create a self-reinforcing cycle of early success.”

Those traits, often dismissed as narcissism or “founderitis,” can create structural challenges as a company scales.

“As a company scales, the founder can become a bottleneck,” Baer said. “They can’t consume all the information, decisions slow down, and team autonomy suffers. People defer upward instead of making decisions at lower levels.”

Read more.—JH

Reactor, a real-time AI video startup founded by ex-Apple engineers, raised a $59 million Series A led by Lightspeed Ventures, with participation from Jeffrey Katzenberg’s WndrCo holding company, Sky9 Capital, Amplify Partners, and FPV Ventures. (Variety)

AI shopping app Phia, founded by Sophia Kianni and Phoebe Gates, raised a $35.5 million Series A led by Notable Capital, Kleiner Perkins, and Khosla Venture, with participation from notable names including Alix Earle, Alexandre Arnault, Ice Spice, Khloé Kardashian, OpenAI partnership head Charles Porch, and Poppi founder Allison Ellsworth. (WWD)

Observable Space, a startup with operations in Detroit and Los Angeles focused on building communications hardware to keep track of in-orbit traffic, raised a $90 million Series A co-led by Upfront Ventures, Island Green Capital, Detroit Venture Partners, and RTX Ventures, with participation from BRV Capital Management and Fathom Fund. (Payload Space)