Ram Radhakrishnan likes to begin the logistics story before the logistics people arrive. A brand has approved a design. Somewhere across an ocean, fabric is cut, seams are stitched and cartons begin their slow accumulation. The freight booking sits in the future, but the facts that will determine it are already taking shape beside the production line. A missed milestone here can become an air-freight bill there. A flawed sample can become a container of regret. For years, these moments lived in separate inboxes, spreadsheets and time zones. Radhakrishnan built Silq to make them travel together.
It is a founder's idea born from an operator's annoyance. Silq combines people who visit factories, inspect goods and report production milestones with the systems and services that eventually move those goods. The point is not to make a prettier map of a shipment already at sea. It is to know enough, early enough, to change what happens next.
Radhakrishnan has a number for this blind spot. Products can spend 90 to 120 days moving from concept to delivery, he has explained, while only the final 30 to 45 days cover the journey from factory to consumer. By his arithmetic, about 70 percent of the supply-chain journey happens inside the factory. The container gets the romance. The factory calendar gets the leverage.
An engineer learns the price of a handoff
The route to this conclusion was pleasingly indirect. Radhakrishnan studied aeronautical engineering at Anna University. His early work included a planning and execution internship at Gulf Air and a supply-chain and sourcing role at Paramount Airways. The degree suggested machines in the sky. The career became a study of everything required to get ordinary objects across borders on purpose.
After consulting and a supply-chain management job in India, he moved to the United States for an MBA at Montclair State University. His public record there includes graduate research work for an international business association linking 150 universities, along with a runner-up finish in the Prudential Case Competition. Soon came C.H. Robinson, where an internship turned into account management and route development. He then managed a trade lane at Toll Group before joining Flexport in late 2014.
Flexport was growing quickly, and so was his remit. Radhakrishnan moved from account management to partnerships, then into leadership of the less-than-container-load product. By 2018, he was vice president and global head of LCL. The acronym is mundane and the problem is not. A shipper with too little cargo to fill a container must share. Every shared box is a puzzle involving timing, routing, pricing and trust among strangers whose cartons happen to be going in the same direction.
In 2019, he wrote about OceanMatch, Flexport's effort to place LCL cargo into underused container space. It was a neat piece of operational housekeeping: find the emptiness, coordinate the parties and waste less capacity. A year later, his new company would apply similar instincts farther upstream. Find the informational emptiness. Put the right person beside it. Make the signal useful to everyone downstream.
“Products spend 90 to 120 days going from concept to delivery.”Ram Radhakrishnan
The factory floor becomes a data source
Silq began in March 2020 under the name SKUteam. The timing made any lesson about supply-chain fragility rather difficult to miss. But Radhakrishnan's interest was more specific than congestion at a port. He wanted the buyer to see what was happening during sample development and production, while the product was still changeable and the shipping plan was still a plan.
The founding circle carried old connections. Kate Alexander, another Flexport alum, joined the early effort. Vishnu Nair became chief technology officer. Nair and Radhakrishnan had once attended engineering classes together in India, a tidy reunion for two people now trying to engineer a less mysterious journey for shirts, shoes and home goods.
The Silq model gives brands on-site merchandisers and quality inspectors who visit factories, track milestones and perform checks. Their reports flow through a mobile application and platform. Factory work, quality assurance and freight planning can then operate from a shared account of reality. Human observation is not treated as the quaint prelude to software. It is the input the software needs.
How an earlier signal travels
milestone
reports data
changes early
This arrangement changes the economics of bad news. If a production run is late, the freight team may adjust before it commits to space. If an inspection finds defects, the product can be corrected before it becomes an international parcel with its own paperwork. If the cargo-ready date is dependable, a brand can book earlier and avoid some of the premiums charged by panic.
The language around supply chains tends to make visibility sound almost spiritual. In practice it is a person, a checklist, a timestamp and a decision. Radhakrishnan's skill has been to keep those pieces in the same sentence.
Capital for the unglamorous middle
In March 2022, Silq announced a $17.6 million Series A co-led by F-Prime Capital and Flexport Ventures, with Eight Roads Ventures India, Surface Ventures, Forum Ventures and angel investors participating. The capital was earmarked for the factory-partner network, more trained merchandisers and quality inspectors across Asia, and the technology carrying their work back to brands.
The pitch had a refreshing lack of theatre. A consumer brand can spend lavishly on design and acquisition, then lose margin through a production delay that nobody saw, a defect discovered too late or freight purchased under duress. Silq proposed that the boring middle deserved its own operating system and its own people.
Radhakrishnan described the mission as building an “information highway” that makes transactions efficient, fast and reliable for everyone in the supply chain. The highway metaphor works because the company is concerned with movement. Yet the valuable cargo here is often a small fact arriving on time: the shade is wrong, the line is late, the order is ready, the booking can hold.
“Our mission is to build an information highway that makes transactions efficient, fast and reliable for all stakeholders in the supply chain.”Ram Radhakrishnan
A public voice for an uncertain trade
As Silq has grown, Radhakrishnan's public work has widened from production visibility to the larger forces rearranging global trade. He writes and speaks about tariffs, bonded warehouses, free-trade zones, customs billing and the practical limits of moving production away from China. His tone is that of someone unwilling to confuse a policy announcement with an operating plan.
That distinction mattered in 2025, when tariff policy returned to the center of boardroom conversations. Radhakrishnan offered specific actions for importers with goods already moving, including exploring bonded storage and changing how duties are paid. He also pushed against the fantasy that an industrial base can be copied by changing a purchase order. China, he noted, still accounts for a large share of manufacturing output, while alternatives such as Vietnam and India can remain dependent on Chinese raw materials.
At a trade discussion hosted at the Consulate General of India in San Francisco, he praised the scale of India's economy and its capacity to absorb millions of new graduates. Then came the operator's punchline: yes, they discussed tariffs, and nobody really knew. It was a joke with a useful edge. Uncertainty is permanent. The job is to build systems that can respond without pretending otherwise.
The stealable idea: ask where your industry learns bad news. Then move that moment closer to the work, while there are still cheap choices available.
The company dream, with fewer Slack chimes
There is a personal thread beneath the containers. In a 2020 announcement about expanding the team, Radhakrishnan wrote that building a company had been a lifelong dream. Growing up in India, he had watched his parents build multiple businesses. The founder story, in other words, began before the logistics résumé.
His updates about Silq often return to the team. After an India offsite near Mahabalipuram, he wrote with pride about how colleagues had evolved and adapted through a turbulent year. He also seemed delighted to have escaped the constant prompts of Slack and Gmail for a little while. Even the information-highway founder occasionally appreciates a road with no notifications.
Today his aspiration remains legible across the company's evolution from SKUteam to Silq and from apparel production intelligence to a broader freight operation. He wants the parties in global trade to act from the same, timely set of facts. The ambition is large. The method is resolutely concrete: visit the factory, inspect the work, report what changed, plan the shipment.
There is no promise here that global trade will become simple. Tariffs will move. Factories will slip. Containers will fill unevenly. A shirt will still have to pass through more hands than anyone at the checkout imagines. Radhakrishnan's bet is narrower and more believable. The surprise does not have to travel as far as the product.