Caroline Grey
Co-Founder and Chief Revenue Officer, Treefera
There’s a glaring blindspot in under pressure global supply chains: the first mile. This crucial but still opaque area – the point of origin for raw materials – is where around 60% of volatility and risk originates. Yet many businesses still have limited visibility and a lack of data into this critical part of their value chain, even as it faces growing strain from evolving regulatory and compliance demands, resource availability and climate change.
These challenges are particularly hard felt in the first mile of nature-based commodity supply chains, where extreme weather conditions, land degradation, strained water sources and operational inefficiencies have far-ranging consequences for businesses and their customers.
Only recently have major international brands, from food and beverage giants like Starbucks and Mondelez International through to tyre manufacturers like Bridgestone and Michelin been forced to shift their supply chain strategies after facing reduced yields, failing crops, constrained supply and rising costs in the first mile.
Critically, first mile disruption doesn’t stop there. It cascades through businesses and their networks, impacting everything from production timelines and shipments through to financing and investment decisions, contractual obligations and the ability to validate ESG and responsible sourcing claims.
The challenge, according to Treefera Co-Founders Caroline Grey and Jonathan Horn, is a lack of defensible, real-time data from the complex first mile, fragmented documentation and a historically heavy reliance on manual data capture.
“There’s been huge investment in the last mile of supply chains and a significant focus on aggregating data across the middle mile, meaning we understand those areas quite well,” says Caroline, Co-Founder and Chief Revenue Officer at the London-based startup. “By contrast, the first mile has been relatively untouched largely because the technology to accurately capture data around sourcing, risk and compliance just hasn’t been there.”
Caroline and Jonathan founded Treefera in 2022 to mitigate this challenge, driven in equal measure by inspiration from successful careers across technology, climate tech and finance, and a personal desire to harness innovative technologies to make a meaningful difference.
“The challenges facing supply chains, particularly the first mile, created a perfect storm for an opportunity like Treefera,” says Caroline, who has worked at several technology firms over her career in a go-to-market capacity, including at RPA leader UiPath during its period of hyperscale growth.
“It’s been a really short period of time, including heavy investment in technology, science and R&D, as well as working closely with customers to build a solution that really meets the needs of the market,” she reflects.
“By the time of our seed round we’d just signed a contract worth around £400,000 (US$540,600). Our Series A round was only seven months after and, between that and our recent Series B, we’d grown by about 600%.”
Customers use Treefera to manage and monitor commodities and carbon across three key areas. For sourcing, the platform unlocks supply chain transparency at the source, leveraging high-fidelity and multi-layered data for plot-level accuracy. It also allows for near-time analysis on Tier 3 sites to make more informed, smarter investment decisions and drive the flow of capital.
“One of our clients recently made a US$8bn investment in land in Eastern Europe,” says Caroline. “That level of investment typically involves evaluating in the region of 50 sites, including people visiting to collect and collate data. Working with us, a customer just has to give us pins of the locations and, within minutes, we provide a full assessment to inform the investment decision making. That’s a significant ROI difference.”
To read the full story in the magazine, click HERE.