Interview with Tai Alegbe, CEO and Co-Founder at AI Platform: Contingent

Contingent is the number one AI-powered platform focused on proactive supply chain monitoring. We actively reduce the burden of detecting, mapping and monitoring third-party risk and optimizing the operational resilience of supply chains.

Delivering instant access to accurate updated compliance data, Contingent strengthens global compliance and procurement programs, simplifies and shortens workflows, de-risks reputational damage, and reduces costs.

Our product addresses the key shortcomings of traditional screening risk management solutions, which rely on static monitoring of suppliers while navigating through the overwhelming number of resources available, producing limited insights. We empower procurement, compliance, risk and business resilience professionals to proactively manage the risk present in their supply chains.
 

How did you come up with the idea for the company?

 
My co-founders and I are entrepreneurs at heart having built a number of businesses over the years. As someone determined to build and scale up a category-defining business, I recognized three important factors:

1. I would need to partner with some of the best technical talent that I could find in Europe and understand the technical landscape

2. Join a scaleup to understand the journey of building a business – the good and the bad.

3. Spend time in the U.S. – I believe the US market is a great opportunity for European startups and if you want to build a globally leading business understanding the US market is very important.

I did all three – found co-founders with a technical background in my previous business with whom I would build solid relationships over the next few years. At the same time, I joined a U.S. scale-up and spent three years in New York. After ticking off all of those boxes, I realized it was the right time to come back to the UK and found Contingent with the other co-founders.

The risk intelligence market was one that I had prior experience in during my time at Arachnys. My time in the industry allowed me to witness first hand the many pain points troubling clients and users of different SaaS solutions in the business/supply chain space. It was with this understanding as well as the support of my co founders that we decided to embark on establishing a company that we hoped would become the single source of truth for supply chain counterparty intelligence.
 

How has the need for Contingent evolved during the pandemic?

 
Given our solution and how it relates to addressing some of the supply chain related disruptions that have been a very visible consequence of the pandemic (e.g. PPE shortages and the like) our business has definitely garnered a lot of interest in the industry.

We were always focused on building a business for the future and the pandemic served to highlight our value add – increase traction, more interest in what we built, closing deals quicker and help accelerate some of the corporate thinking across supply chains.

What we’ve built is very unique – there is a large degree of data molds and IP around it so to that respect we are uniquely positioned to take advantage of the opportunity in relation to some of the incumbents in the market.
 

What can we hope to see from Contingent in the future?

We just closed our seed funding round in November 2020. The funding 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 financial fragility 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 as we scale up our team. Our goal is to build and support the community of supply chain professionals that are looking for ways to stay ahead of the curve and strengthen the operational resilience of their company’s supply chain.