He found the trusted source of trade truth that nobody had. So he built it - and put it on a billion-dollar map.
Evan Smith. Cartographer of commerce, by trade.
Ask Evan Smith what Altana does and he will not start with software. He starts with a question that sounds simple until you try to answer it: where did this actually come from? Not the box. Not the label. The cotton, the chip, the ore - the raw material, three or four suppliers deep, in a factory whose name is on no shipping manifest.
That question is the entire company. Altana takes the world's public and non-public trade data and stitches it into a single intelligent model of the global supply chain. Smith co-founded it in 2018 with CTO Peter Swartz and COO Raphael Tehranian. By July 2024 the company had closed a $200 million Series C, crossed a $1 billion valuation, and joined the small club of supply-chain unicorns. Total raised to date: roughly $323 million.
The clever part is what Altana refuses to do. It does not ask companies to hand over their secrets. Using federated machine learning, businesses - even direct competitors - contribute to a shared map without exposing their own underlying data. Everyone reads from the same model. Nobody has to trust everyone else to use it. That design choice is why a logistics giant and a chemical maker and a federal agency can all sit on the same network.
And they do. By 2025, U.S. Customs and Border Protection had selected Altana's AI-powered Product Passports to trace goods back to raw materials, with enterprise partners including Maersk, BASF, and L.L. Bean sharing into the system. CBP also leans on the platform for forced-labor enforcement under the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act and for tracking illicit fentanyl networks. The supply chain, in Smith's hands, became a place you can enforce the law.
Our mission is to fix globalization, not to retreat from it.
Smith did not arrive at supply chains through software. He came through the messy physical version of it. Before Altana he served as CEO of IMBU Technologies, a textile supply chain automation company, and co-managed a private equity partnership under a family office. Cotton and balance sheets, not cloud and APIs.
The pivot happened at Panjiva, a trade data science company, where Smith led enterprise solutions and strategic partnerships. It is also where he met Swartz and Tehranian. Working with global trade data all day, the three of them kept hitting the same wall: there was no trusted, real-time source of truth for how the world's goods actually moved and where they truly originated. The buyers wanted it. The regulators needed it. It simply did not exist.
So in 2018 they left to build it. The bet was that a shared model of the supply chain - neutral, federated, always current - would become infrastructure. Not a dashboard you check, but a layer the global economy runs on top of.
CEO of IMBU Technologies (textile supply chain software); co-managed a family-office private equity partnership.
Leads enterprise solutions and partnerships; meets future co-founders Swartz and Tehranian.
Co-founds Altana to build a trusted, shared model of the global supply chain.
Publishes the "Globalization 2.0" manifesto.
CBP selects Altana to help implement the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act.
Closes $200M Series C; reaches $1B valuation and unicorn status.
CBP picks Altana Product Passports for next-gen traceability and trusted trade.
In 2022 Smith published a manifesto. His argument: the globalization that took off after 1945 and peaked around the turn of the century was built mostly to chase cheap outsourcing. It is breaking. The answer is not to wall it off - it is to rebuild it around trusted networks.
Map suppliers deep enough that a shock three tiers down stops being a surprise. Resilience starts with visibility.
Forced labor, sanctions, narcotics, tariffs - turn each into a data problem the supply chain can answer.
Smith argues governments need a bigger seat at the table, working alongside business and civil society.
Great power competition, climate change, and the breakdown of globalization are generational challenges that require a new model for managing global business.
Altana crossed $1 billion in July 2024 on a $200M Series C led by the US Innovative Technology Fund.
GV (Google Ventures), USIT, Salesforce Ventures, March Capital, Generation Investment Management, Activate Capital, OMERS Ventures and more.
U.S. Customs uses Altana for forced-labor enforcement, counternarcotics, and AI Product Passports.
Maersk, BASF, and L.L. Bean among the companies sharing into Altana's shared model.
Rivals contribute to one map without exposing their own data - the architectural trick that makes the network possible.
Built from a Brooklyn HQ at 25 Kent Ave, not a traditional logistics hub.