Matthew Haber

A supply chain company that started backstage

Most people who fix the electronics supply chain arrive through procurement, manufacturing or a hardware engineering degree. Matthew Haber arrived through a projector. His first professional life was theater design - a BFA in stage design, a union card with United Scenic Artists, and credits that run from Broadway and Off-Broadway to touring shows for Dave Chappelle, Third Eye Blind and David Byrne. One early job had him projection-mapping the surface of an artifact for art restoration work in Nepal. The throughline was never the stage. It was the problem of making physical things behave on cue.

That instinct kept pulling him toward the parts of a show nobody in the audience thinks about: the controllers, the sensors, the gear that has to fire at exactly the right millisecond or the whole thing falls apart. The leap from there to a venture-backed procurement platform looks wild on a resume. Up close it is almost a straight line - someone who kept following the wiring backstage until he ended up at the factory.

From show control to self-driving cars

He co-founded BeSide, an experiential technology and R&D studio that built interactive work for Google, Samsung, Cadillac, Visa and Armani, plus show-control systems for escape rooms and themed entertainment. The studio's contract R&D wandered far from the spotlight - entertainment, architecture, consumer electronics, medical devices, and autonomous vehicles. Somewhere in that range, the team was solving year-long component lead times for the self-driving car company Zoox. That is where the real problem revealed itself.

BeSide sold to the agency MAS in 2018 through a private-equity-backed acquisition. Haber stayed on as VP of Technology, steering the agency through its COVID-era jump to digital, standing up software service lines, and advising companies like CrowdStrike, Zendesk and Postmates on tech strategy. He had, by then, built hardware and software for some of the largest brands and tech companies in the world. He had also collected a very specific grievance: every time his teams needed to build something physical, they hit the same wall. The parts. The lead times. The spreadsheets.

Cofactr, or: the tool he wished existed

Cofactr, which Haber co-founded with Phillip Gulley, is built on a single conviction - that hardware should be as agile and scalable as software, and the only thing standing in the way is bad data. The platform gives engineering, procurement and product teams one view of their technical, inventory and sourcing data, so they can see the real-time truth of their supply chain instead of reconstructing it from email threads and stale exports. It combines cloud procurement software, a supplier network, and a turn-key logistics operation that handles shipping, customs, counterfeit insurance, inventory, kitting and fulfillment.

The customers are not building phones in the millions. They are building rockets, satellites, drones, robots, autonomous vehicles, medical devices and wearables - low-volume, high-stakes, heavily regulated hardware where one wrong or counterfeit component is a catastrophe, not a return. Almost half of Cofactr's customers sit in aerospace and defense, which is why the platform leans hard into ITAR and SOC 2 compliance and aerospace-grade traceability. When you are sourcing parts that end up in a satellite, "trust me, it's the right chip" does not clear the audit.

Data first, then AI

Haber is careful about the order of operations. The pitch is not "AI for supply chain" dropped on top of chaos. It is clean, synchronized data first - a digital twin of the supply chain that is actually accurate - and AI layered on top to forecast demand, flag disruptions before they bite, automate procurement workflows, and monitor parts for obsolescence and risk. The reason the data matters more than the model is exactly the grievance from the BeSide years: a brilliant forecast built on a million stale spreadsheets is just a confident wrong answer.

$17.2M, and a problem half the customers share

Cofactr went through Y Combinator's Winter 2022 batch. In December 2024 it raised a $17.2M Series A led by Bain Capital Ventures, with existing seed backers Y Combinator, Floating Point Ventures, Broom and DNX joining in. That brought total funding to roughly $28.8M. The plan for the money is unglamorous in the best way: scale go-to-market, and grow the suite of supply chain risk-management and process tools. No pivot, no reinvention - just more of the thing that is working, aimed at an industry that has spent the last few years rediscovering that an agile supply chain is a competitive weapon, not a back-office cost.

What makes Haber unusual as a founder is not the funding or the customer logos. It is the route. He spent years building one-off magical experiences for audiences who never saw the machinery, and somewhere in that work he became fluent in the least glamorous, most consequential layer of modern manufacturing - whether the part shows up, whether it is real, and whether you can prove it. He is now building the infrastructure for the people building the future, having quietly figured out that the boring problem was the important one all along.