Manifest Vegas: Q&A with Francisco Martin-Rayo

The global food supply chain has long been at the mercy of the elements, but as climate change accelerates, traditional monitoring methods are failing.

In an era of sudden crop failures and unprecedented volatility, high-level monthly reports have become "garbage" data for companies needing real-time precision. Helios AI is closing this gap by fusing climate risk with pricing and availability data – predicting disruptions months before they hit the headlines.

We caught up with Francisco Martin-Rayo, CEO of Helios AI, to talk about the company’s origins, the necessity of predictive signals and why reactivity is no longer a viable strategy for supply chain leaders.

Could you tell us about your background and what led you to found Helios AI?

Myself and my Co-Founder felt that we've kind of bungled climate change and that it was only going to accelerate and it was going to wreak havoc across the food supply chain – and that's been the case.

We felt that we could build something that could predict all these disruptions before they happen. We started as a company that could predict these agricultural disruptions anywhere in the world. 

How has the technology evolved to meet those customer demands?

Technology has evolved so much and we have so much incredible proprietary data around what's being grown where, what the seasonality is that we've now built the first platform that has both climate risk and your availability risk and prices for the first time together.

You don't have to settle for these like garbage once a month, once a quarter like high-level reports that you're getting about different, you know, specialty crops. You should get custom reports that come in your inbox every week about the places, the commodities, the questions that you care about.

What are the biggest challenges you are helping your customers solve today?

You have longstanding, really good relationships with your suppliers around the world. Even the best suppliers sometimes are no longer able to fulfil their contracts because you have this incredible variability of climate change.

So, you need to build secondary, even tertiary suppliers. But how do you do that ahead of time and in a way that doesn't absolutely destroy your margins? I think those are the biggest challenges we're helping customers with today.

Can you share a specific example of how Helios AI has impacted a supply chain?

We work with one of the largest CPGs in the world. They produce a ton of soft drinks, and we were able to predict the huge disruption that happened in Brazilian citrus months before it occurred.

I mean eight months before Reuters and Expand talked about it. That company had eight months where it could find alternative suppliers and get the best price instead of running around trying to scramble for availability when it was already too late.

What are your three key pieces of advice for supply chain leaders looking to build resilience?

One, you’ve got to really understand the pain points and the data in your supply chain. Two, you have to be more predictive, because if you don’t start ingesting these predictive signals, you won’t be able to build resilience in time.

Three, you have to create flexibility in your team and individually. You need to build processes that allow you to look forward and react with time to the disruptions coming down the pipe. You really see the shift where it’s not good enough to just wait for bad things to happen and react; you have to be much more proactive about getting ahead of these disruptions.