The A to Z of Spend Matters Future 5 2021 — Introducing Circulor

As markets evolve, grow and mature, so supply and demand changes. Businesses must continue to adapt and so must the tools they use to support them. The procurement technology market too is rapidly evolving to respond to changing needs, talent maturity, compliance, regulation, risk, faster time-to-market and more. It’s not easy for heads of procurement to keep a watchful eye on the new, adaptive technologies and capabilities that are entering what is already a very crowded space. But Spend Matters does.

Our procurement technology analysts scour the market each year to find those new solution providers that can fulfil a very specialist and niche role to cater for procurement’s current needs. After weeks of strong debate and scrutiny based on their extensive market knowledge of the procurement technologies they review, analyse and benchmark every day, they wheedle down tens of start-ups to find five that they believe are exciting, have a rapidly rising presence in the market, are in it for the long run, and which every CPO should have on their radar.

These start-ups invariably take existing technologies much further to address the problems they can’t, or are introducing a new category of automation that tackles new challenges in interesting ways. We believe these companies deserve greater visibility, especially in a market which is increasingly consolidating and diluting buyer choices.

The Future 5 list is a true complement to our 50 Providers to Watch and 50 Providers to Know lists, which highlight the more established tech firms you should either be watching or get to know. Many outstanding procurement technology start-ups move from early-stage to market contenders quickly, graduating to the ‘To Watch’ list.

So we are delighted to introduce you to our Future 5s as we capture their voices. In no order of preference other than alphabetically they are:

• Archlet
• Circulor
• Malbek
• Pactum
• Zip

Introducing Circulor

Many readers will be familiar with Circulor; as well as our analyst coverage (see below) they contributed to our ESG series talking about supply chain mapping and n-tier visibility for sustainability.

Circulor is a young and ascending supply chain visibility vendor. It tracks and traces minerals starting at the mine and continuing to the OEM using reporting data and statistical process-control methodology. Circulor bills itself as “TAAS” (traceability-as-a-service) for material provenance, creating a “digital twin” of your product.

The main reason for Circulor’s selection as a Future 5 for 2021 is its method of tackling CO2 emissions, which is truly innovative. Circulor is unique in that it goes down to the material transformation level. This is fundamentally different from simply reporting emissions estimates on a form, as Circulor’s solution actually calculates it bottoms-up and tracks the whole material lifecycle on blockchain.

Read more about what Circulor does and our reasons for its selection here.

We talked to Douglas Johnson‑Poensgen, Circulor’s CEO to understand more about …

How Circulor came into being

“I’ve always believed that old problems can be unlocked by new technologies,” he said. “I first learnt about blockchain in 2010 when some of the cryptographers working for me at BT were getting very excited about bitcoin. Some of them have now retired off the proceeds, whereas I started wondering about how the underlying tech might one day have value outside of crypto. That curiosity combined with a desire to create a business with a focus on people and the planet led us to supply chain challenges underpinning the energy transition. These include responsible sourcing (i.e. avoiding child labor or deforestation) as well decarbonizing supply chains (the eight most polluting account for half of all global emissions).”

What’s Circulor’s greatest strength?

“Our collective desire for things drives demand and has led to accelerating global carbon emissions. Many of the raw materials that end up in our products come with concerns about child labor, deforestation or irreparable environmental damage. The energy transition (like electric vehicles and energy storage systems) relies on metals to make batteries. The demand for these materials and the massive energy cost of manufacturing batteries powered by non-sustainable electricity will significantly increase emissions. You cannot manage something you cannot measure or track, that’s where Circulor comes in. Bringing greater transparency to these complex industrial supply chains is the defining problem of our lifetime. With the supply chain globally accounting for 80% of all emissions, if we fail to grip this, we will not halt the rise of emissions,” he said.

What’s next for Circulor?

“We are growing fast driven by the ESG agenda facing businesses in the most polluting industries. We are expanding geographically to try to cope with the level of inbound demand for our services as we win more enterprise customers. Circulor is entering the hyper-growth phase of our evolution,” he was delighted to say.

What does it mean to be a Future 5?

“It is a huge honor to be selected as one of such a small group of change makers.  We are on a mission to make an impact on the real world.  That means more customers doing better business because we have helped them manage what was previously invisible. I hope that our Future 5 status can help accelerate our customer growth and therefor our impact.”

Many thanks to Circulor for sharing their success with us. We hope the Future 5 broadens our readers’ perception of what’s possible with technology to help you position your organization to address the future’s challenges.

The full Future 5 and 50/50 lists can be found in the Spend Matters Almanac, our free vendor directory, where Circulor sits within the Governance, Risk & Compliance category.

If you haven’t already, please register your own organization if you’d like to make a start on getting your solution in front of the technology analysts.

You can also find our existing coverage of Circulor here in our more in-depth subscription PRO analysis:

ESG vendor profiles of Circulor, SupplyShift, Transparency-One, FRDM and Wholechain: How supply chain visibility solutions address sustainability efforts