Manufacturing is so back, baby. This morning, “supply chain orchestration” platform Silkline announced in an exclusive interview with Tectonic that they’ve raised a $4M seed round led by Origin Ventures with participation from Forward Deployed VC, 25madison, MatchstickVentures, Barrel Ventures, and Plow Ventures.
The company—founded a little over two years ago—uses AI to make “sourcing from multiple suppliers [for advanced manufacturing] effortless, resulting in higher quality materials delivered faster and at better costs.” They say they’ll use the new pile of cash to build out their product, engineering, and go-to-market teams, and expand platform features.
Down and dirty: We’ve harped on this before, but sometimes the unsexy side of defense tech deserves a little limelight, too.
Behind all of the shiny, go-boom stuff we love to write about, there is a vast network of suppliers—from mom and pop shops up to massive primes—that make the whole system tick. And no matter how advanced the tech they’re helping to build becomes, much of this network still communicates using Excel spreadsheets, PDFs of things like requests for quotes (RFQs), and emails. Retro.
“When you’re working with such a diverse supply base, it’s really hard to get everyone on the same page,” CEO and Co-Founder Isaac Chambers told Tectonic. “Systems that work for Lockheed are not the same systems that work for a mom and pop machine shop…the lowest common denominator, then, becomes email and PDF documents. [That’s a] really manual way of orchestrating that really complex and diverse supply base.”
Chambers saw this firsthand while working as a consultant for Deloitte, where one of his main clients was Lockheed Martin. On everything from the F-35 to different missile programs, he watched this manual data get thrown around and suppliers struggle to plug into the Lockheed system, which in some cases could lead to delays.
“The vision behind what we’re building at Silkline is to sit in these native workflows so that buyers don’t have to change their workflow to meet suppliers where they’re at,” he said.
Naturally, he paired up with an ex-Palantirian to make all of this disparate data make sense. His co-founder, Brent Shulman, spent years working with government and commercial customers at the data giant, which means he’s a pro at “putting [data] into a composable view that is nicely integrated from different systems,” Chambers said.
Streamline: Chambers described Silkline as a “Rosetta Stone across all of these different trading partners that are on different systems.” Here’s how the whole thing works:
- Silkline is designed to “meet suppliers where they are”—it sits as a connective layer between internal systems (ERP/MES/PLM) and the supplier world of emails and PDFs.
- Users can send out RFQs to suppliers via the platform, suppliers respond, and advanced manufacturing companies can pick the best option (based on price, quality, speed, etc).
- The platform then generates purchase orders (POs), sends them out to the chosen supplier, and allows the user to track progress.
- Silkline also helps out with compliance documentation, including FAR/DFARS and ISO/AS9100.
- Suppliers also get scorecards so companies know who’s good and, well, who’s not.
- Silkline works on a tiered subscription model—the more customers need in terms of features, the more they pay.
- With this new cash, Chambers said they plan to build out their team and features offered— “Things that really fit nicely into the platform but provide an expanded capability,” Shulman said.
Next generation: Chambers said that in the new, lightning-quick world of defense tech, having a coordinated and transparent supplier base is all the more important. The company is already working with some deep tech heavyweights, including Vast, Castelion, H3X, K2 Space, Antares Industries, and Machina Labs.
“[These companies] have to rapidly procure materials to build a new product, a new capability, then test it, get feedback in the field, and make engineering changes,” he said, “That requires very rapid sourcing [and] a tremendous amount of organization.”
Friends in high places: So far, the product seems like a hit. H3X and Machina Labs both say that Silkline has saved them time and helped them coordinate with suppliers.
It’s worth noting that a lot of Silkline’s customers are pulled straight from its investors’ own portfolios (there’s that Palantir mafia Forward Deployed VC founder Mark Scianna told us about). That’s no coincidence—Chambers said that’s a huge part of how they secured this round of funding.
“[Investors] were able to talk directly to our customers without an introduction and get to…conviction,” he said. “They’re hearing firsthand from these hardware companies that are rolling up their sleeves and building products that have never been built before how Silkline is impacting their workflow.”
Let us go on the record as saying we never doubted the power of the mafia.