A stolen painting and a missing excavator have more in common than their owners would wish. Both can disappear into a market that knows too little about what it is buying. David Shillingford built part of his career around that awkward gap. Before he helped companies examine the risks inside global supply chains, he worked on recovering stolen art. The glamour belonged to the paintings. Much of the useful work belonged to a database.
It is an appealingly untidy beginning for a technology founder. His route passed through chemistry, the British Army, art recovery and construction equipment. Look closely, though, and the changes of scenery reveal a recurring problem: valuable things move between people who hold different pieces of information. A connection between those pieces can change what happens next.
A chemistry degree, followed by the Army
Shillingford studied chemistry at the University of Exeter and trained at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst. The Army had sponsored his university education. He went into the British airborne forces, served as a captain and stayed for eight years. An obligation had become work he enjoyed.
That background makes the eventual analytics career look tidier in retrospect than it felt at the time. In his own account of leaving the Army, he had no clear idea what would follow. It is a useful detail to retain. Career biographies have a habit of giving their subjects a destination several years before the subjects themselves possessed one.
The next destination was the Art Loss Register, where he helped develop the North American operation. By 1998 he was in New York. The business collected information about missing art so that a work offered for sale could be checked against a record of its disappearance. Recovery required an object, a reliable description and someone who could connect the two. A good database could be a surprisingly effective detective.
From Cézanne to the construction site
The move into heavy equipment began with a complaint from insurers. Stolen construction machinery was a persistent problem. Shillingford had been working in a world of named artists and identifiable objects; here was another market with expensive assets and an information problem. The National Equipment Register, which he founded in 2001, applied a database approach to stolen machinery.
The change had a certain comic economy. An art-recovery executive could exchange the gallery for a building site without entirely changing the question. Who owns this object? Has somebody reported it missing? What information would allow the right people to recognise it? The machinery was less likely to be admired under flattering light, but its owners were equally interested in getting it back.
Verisk acquired the National Equipment Register in 2007. Shillingford subsequently led Verisk Crime Analytics and helped launch CargoNet, extending the work into cargo theft. His remit also included retail loss-prevention acquisitions. Across those businesses, information became more useful when insurers, asset owners and investigators could put their separate knowledge to work together.
A forecast needs somewhere to land
The next chapter broadened the question from missing goods to interrupted movement. In 2018 Columbia Capital created Rising Tide Digital as a vehicle for supply-chain analytics investments, with Shillingford as CEO. Its ambition involved bringing complementary businesses together. Resilience360, developed within DHL, supplied capabilities for assessing and monitoring operational risk. Riskpulse brought weather and transportation analytics.
A January 2020 announcement set out the combination. In March 2021 the businesses unveiled the Everstream Analytics name. The company’s foundations therefore included both the routes goods travel and the events that can interfere with them. There is a practical difference between knowing a storm exists and understanding which planned deliveries it might affect. The second question gives an operator something to decide.
Shillingford was CEO when the Everstream brand launched. In June 2021 Julie Gerdeman became CEO and he moved to chief strategy officer. He later became a co-founder and advisor. The sequence matters because his connection to the company continued through different jobs: assembling the businesses, shaping their direction and advising after the chief executive’s chair had passed to someone else.
The rather useful question of a refrigerated truck
His explanations of the business become particularly clear when he leaves the language of corporate resilience behind and talks about an actual shipment. In 2021 he described a model that could simulate a route two weeks before departure and assess whether its temperature exposure justified refrigerated transport. The answer depended on the load and the conditions along the way.
That is a wonderfully unceremonious destination for predictive analytics: the correct kind of trailer. A refrigerated truck can be necessary; it can also add cost when the shipment does not require it. In Shillingford’s example, a better assessment could save money and reduce emissions. The point was to fit the decision to the risk of that journey.
Everstream’s partnership with project44 added location visibility to that calculation. A dot on a map answers where an asset is. Bringing risk information alongside it helps explain what may happen between that position and arrival. His work had moved upstream from recovering an object after a loss toward helping operators make choices before a journey began.
A warehouse key beats a clever slide
For someone whose career involves so much data, Shillingford also spends time discussing relationships. At the 2022 Future of Freight Festival in Chattanooga, he interviewed Shaw Industries’ Lance Starks. Their conversation included a small, telling example from last-mile delivery: trusted drivers who held keys to customers’ warehouses and could start the coffee before the staff arrived.
The detail is worth more than a ceremonial declaration that people matter. Those keys represent knowledge accumulated through repeated work: who can enter, what a customer expects, when a delivery can be left. Technology has to operate within relationships like these. An impressive forecast still needs someone who can act, and often someone else willing to cooperate.
He also worked with Margi van Gogh and colleagues at the World Economic Forum on supply-system visibility for organisations such as UNICEF. A 2023 report on shared intelligence lists him among its contributors. In a later reflection, he described finally meeting collaborator Tal Viskin in person after working together remotely. The network on the screen had acquired a face.
The founder who distrusts the founder story
In January 2024 Shillingford announced that he was joining Columbia Capital as a venture partner. His brief included advising supply-chain portfolio companies and supporting new investments. He had already worked with Columbia while building Everstream. Moving toward the investor’s side of the table extended an existing relationship.
His argument for the sector was practical. Moving goods through multiple organisations, borders and time zones leaves plenty of room for improvement. But he also acknowledged the distance between enthusiasm for new technology and the work required to deliver results. Some supply-chain leaders, he wrote, wanted their existing systems to work as expected before buying anything else. It is a perfectly reasonable request, although less photogenic than a product launch.
His advice to entrepreneurs emphasised listening, demonstrable returns, delivery and support. In a 2025 career discussion, he also warned against learning entrepreneurship solely from its public success stories and spectacular failures. Most businesses occupy less theatrical ground. Choosing a startup, in his account, involves judging the circumstances of your own life as well as the business opportunity.
“Risk is our strength, that’s what we do.”
David Shillingford, discussing Everstream in 2021
Still asking what sits beyond the first supplier
His more recent work keeps returning to the limits of an incomplete picture. In April 2026 he wrote about resilience for industrial equipment manufacturers, describing redundancy, optionality and agility as complementary capabilities. A buffer helps absorb a disruption. Alternatives create choices. Speed determines how quickly those choices can be used. Simply accumulating more of everything would be an expensive interpretation.
Later that month, a CIPS Futures interview addressed chokepoints, supply webs and concentrated risk. The discussion put scenario planning across business functions on the agenda. By July, his public writing was also questioning compliance programmes designed around a narrower world of regulations and supplier tiers. The subjects change, but the underlying concern remains recognisable: a business may depend on connections that its ordinary view does not reveal.
His annual photographic reviews offer another way into that concern. December 2025 brought Supply Chain 2025 in 25 Images, following earlier editions built around the same device. Pictures give a sprawling subject some edges. They also remind readers that the abstractions eventually involve places, vehicles, materials and people.
Off duty, the hedges receive close attention
There are other uses for an organising instinct. On Shelter Island, conversations among British and Australian friends helped turn cricket from a recurring barbecue subject into an actual tournament. The first event took place in 2012. Shillingford’s verdict on the standard of play was dry enough to preserve the dignity of everyone involved: “The game was adequate, putting it strongly.”
At the Connecticut garden he shared with his wife Pom, the division of labour became equally specific. She developed the flowers; he took charge of topiary and fruit-tree pruning. He taught himself pruning by watching videos of cider farmers in Somerset. The adviser on international supply networks was quite prepared to become a pupil in the orchard.
That makes a pleasing final image for a career so concerned with information: Shillingford watching someone who knows how a thing works, then applying it carefully. A database, a delivery route and a fruit tree demand different expertise. Each rewards attention to what is actually there. And the hedge, unlike a conference audience, will provide its verdict without applause.