Today Contingent, the AI-powered supplier risk and resilience platform, announces an approx. €1.9 million seed funding round led by Connect Ventures. The round also includes participation from Seedcamp, Concentric and Angel Invest Ventures. Contingent is a cutting edge platform that leverages AI to quickly reduce the enormous burden of detecting, mapping and monitoring third-party risk and maintaining operational resilience compliance for its customers.
Contingent’s vision is to transform the way third-party risk monitoring and assessment works today. It aims to empower procurement, compliance and operational professionals with proactive AI predictions and real-time, actionable alerts. The platform actively screens, monitors and updates users on the risk present in their supply chains. The technology then delivers instant access to accurate and updated supply chain and third-party insights. In doing so, Contingent strengthens global compliance and procurement programs, simplifies and removes manual workflows, de-risks third-party relationships, maintains supplier resilience and reduces operational costs.
Contingent operates in a wide range of markets, including financial services, defence, banking, healthcare and technology. Contingent has a diverse customer base, counting challenger banks, payment providers, and large numbers of international corporates as customers. The platform has helped these customers map, manage and monitor their suppliers, providing detailed insight into their supply chains as well as reducing the administrative strain on their procurement teams.
The company currently operates out of the UK, with a presence in the United States and serving clients who have international operations. Customers can sign up for Contingent’s services and platform within a matter of minutes and use the platform daily to assess and monitor risk in their supply chains.
The fresh funds will be used to accelerate product development and expand the number of key supply chain risk parameters that can be used during the assessment process. A key focus will be on delivering analytic support to measure fragility and resilience in clients supply chains, and the team will be improving the platforms’ ability to integrate with enterprise focused systems. The funding will also be used to make a number of strategic hires, with plans to double headcount within the next 12 months.
Tai Alegbe, CEO and co-founder of Contingent said: “There’s never been a greater need to ensure our supply chains are robust and fit for purpose, and this fresh capital injection will ensure our customers have the tools they need to deliver operational resilience. To put it simply, traditional third-party risk management solutions have significant shortcomings, relying on static and reactive monitoring of suppliers which inevitably leads to inaccurate insights. That’s why we’ll be investing heavily in R&D and creating new enterprise partnerships so more users have access to our proactive monitoring capabilities and deep insights and analytics”.
Rory Stirling, General Partner at Connect Ventures added: “The COVID-19 epidemic has shone a light on the fragility of our supply chains, so this is the perfect time for Connect to lend our support, expertise and network to Tai and his team as they help strengthen the ecosystem. At Connect we’ve always been focused on finding entrepreneurs with a product-led mindset who can solve hard problems at scale, and it’s fair to say Contingent has exceeded our expectations as evidenced by the stellar roster of clients they’ve won at such an early stage.”
