EP 015: Provider of the Week: Tradeverifyd

0:15Jim Cahalan: Welcome to this episode of Art of Procurement's Provider of the Week series. These conversations allow us to shine a light on the tech startups challenging and revolutionizing the digital procurement ecosystem. In just 20 minutes, we dig into each organization's origin story and value proposition and explore how they solve business challenges in a unique way. Our Provider and Startup of the Week episodes are the only formats at Art of Procurement that focus specifically on a company's product. And today we're featuring Trade Verified. Trade Verified helps supply chain procurement and compliance teams ask questions of their supply chain and get answers before a crisis reaches their desk.

0:54Jim Cahalan: Powered by AI agents that monitor continuously and auto-ingest new data sources, Trade Verified helps businesses see further and faster. So to tell us more about Trade Verified, I'm delighted to welcome CEO Mike Prorock. Mike has deep expertise in machine learning, analytics, and decentralized systems. And before founding Trade Verified, he served as the Director of Emerging Technologies at Bardis Group, developing and implementing strategies for providing large-scale machine learning and analytics to key clients, including the United Nations, Cisco, and JPMorgan Chase. Thank you so much for joining me, Mike.

1:30Mike Prorock: Thanks for having me, Jim.

1:32Jim Cahalan: Yeah. So for anyone who is listening who may not be familiar, what does Trade Verified do today? And also, how has that solution evolved over time?

1:42Mike Prorock: Yeah, no. Yeah, it's a great question. I think the evolution over time is always something I find interesting because rarely, you know, have I ever seen a startup that was a linear path or really any company. Right. You know, origin stories and kind of how you get from here to there, you know, kind of follows the same way life does for obvious reasons. Right. Any company, any country. It's all made up of people. Right. So stuff will naturally evolve as life happens. I actually, Trade Verified came out of a company that I originally started back in 2016 that was called Measure.io. And we were looking very much at kind of how do we predict for what's happening in the world given just public facing big data, right?

2:31Mike Prorock: So we had weather data, news, all sorts of stuff. could we pick an arbitrary point on the planet and know with a high degree of certainty what was happening there um and and by happening there the economics the you know what is there agriculture going on if so what kind is there mining like all of those kinds of more raw material kind of uh uh you know intelligence and linking that in with things like the um the you know economic indicators and populations all the things you need to know in order to get a good picture when assessing broader risk somewhere could be disease spread or whatever else and that company kind of was you know grew steadily over time like 20 30 a year but it was uh very much uh i guess you put it in the gov tech bucket these days since that's now you know a thing um but it was very much kind of services around a system of information and a bunch of machine learning models and then we would build out the appropriate interfaces for whoever needed whether that was us customs or usda or you know uh homeland security right it really kind of ran the gamut um and then in uh and where that ended up getting us to is we ended up working on some interesting products right we ended up kind of building out some stuff, especially for U.S.

3:59Mike Prorock: Customs and DHS, to do things like identify when risks might cross into the United States, you know, whether that was a biological concern or something else. And you can imagine with COVID, this became very, very interesting. Absolutely. Kept us very busy. And concurrent with that, because I had actually started my career before moving into kind of the more machine learning and information side of things of comp sci, I'd started my career in cryptography. We started looking also at how do we securely, you know, provide a path to modernizing the exchange of cross-border trade information. So how could we speed up imports?

4:49Mike Prorock: How could we have a supplier provide a clear traceability, right? Where did something originate? What was involved, right? You know, help me get this into the country faster, right? And pay less tariff, ideally, right? You know, because we can be very clear about what was happening with a particular shipment. And it was really the combination of those things, kind of that broad intelligence around what was going on in the world plus this notion of traceability and visibility that led to the creation of trade verify okay and in 2024 basically i started getting these inbound calls uh from the you know what fortune 500 exacts basically saying look supply chain risk is gonna become a real problem in a way that even covet didn't quite happen because it's getting way more complex, right?

5:41Mike Prorock: The whole, yeah, geopolitics, everything else right now is getting far more complex. And so that, you know, kind of took my typical startup founder hat, you know, is like, oh, I'm seeing a pattern here, right? And when you start to see a pattern, you got to make a decision, like, is this something to go chase? Or is this something to say, well, maybe that's just not what we do. And I ultimately sat down, kind of ran the math on things and looked at, well, how big of a problem is this really? And it looked pretty big. And so I made a decision to take a hard pivot on the company. We, you know, sat down and basically, you know, restarted the company fresh, carried over all the math and predictive models and stuff like that, but sat down and said, no, all we're going to do is supply chain risk.

6:34Mike Prorock: We're going to answer a simple question. The original question was, if I place an order from someone, am I going to get it? Am I going to get that product I want in time? And that seems like such a simple question. But in reality, when you think about it, it starts to get really complex really fast, because now we're having to look way deep in supply chains, five, six, seven tiers back, in order to understand are we running afoul of a regulation or is there a bottleneck somewhere we weren't thinking about? Is there an alternate supplier we should be considering? Is there a surge of orders for memory that's going to keep us from building machines?

7:13Mike Prorock: So those are the kinds of questions that are now coming. And so kind of started out, ran some pretty good pilots in 2024, expanded that a bit, We were able to raise, fortunately, some more money and bring some strategic partners in. And then 2025, last year, so basically we just stress tested everything. We took it to 50 ,000 supplier plus type companies that just really had complex networks to look at. And then this year has really been all about go to market. How do we make sure we're listening to where the pain points are in the market? Understanding, especially the COO, CFO's needs, like what's actually moving top and bottom line.

8:02Mike Prorock: And now starting to deploy out and scale our operations in terms of how can we go help people that are struggling to figure out, do we need to change supply lines? Do we need to build a new factory? Do we need to, you know, what do we need to do to make sure we don't have an interruption on our current factories? Right. So all those questions that really impact the business deeply.

8:23Jim Cahalan: Yeah. So, you know, there's quite a crowded procurement technology market. Right. And that continues to grow. So I'm curious to hear how do you look at, you know, Trade Verified as different from some of the other. Yeah. Yeah.

8:37Mike Prorock: It's a great thanks for that. I think when I think about software in general, right, this is something that's changing rapidly. When we've moved into the age of AI, one of the things that I think everyone should be just very aware of and very thoughtful of is the fact that you can get exactly what you want with a request, by and large, from a software side. Which means that differentiation has to be a little different than it previously was. Prior, you could just go for a land grab or try to land and expand. Now you have to show real value to the organization in a way that you might have been able to kind of skate by a little bit on before.

9:25Mike Prorock: And so for us, there's a couple of things. I think from a first principle side, privacy is key, right? If we look at what makes an AI model good, it's data, it's information. which means that companies who have spent years building up these libraries of all their contracts their trade networks their bills and materials what's worked and what hasn't what have they had problems that's a gold so for us saying to our customers like you know and partners your data is your data and derivatives of your data will always stay your data as well you're never going to go share that across boundaries. That's been a key part of it, right?

10:08Mike Prorock: Because there's a lot of sensitivity now around, well, if I give this to you, what are you doing with it? And how are you handling it? And so we've got those checks in place to protect a customer's information. So that's one item that I think is important. The second is that when we think about supply chain sourcing, really just generally business operations, right? There's three pools of data. that really matter there's kind of the outside broadly publicly known what's happening in the world right that's important you got to know that um then there's what's happening inside the organization and that's probably as or more important for a couple of reasons but paramount amongst that is only the company themselves knows what risk is yeah so yeah you can't work on risk if you don't know what risk is and if you don't have the privacy no one will tell you what matters to them.

11:03Mike Prorock: They'll tell you pieces, which you'll never get an actual look at. And then the third piece is all that fun derivative data that you've got to go pull together and capture via other channels and create new data from signals in the outside world, combined with other relationships, to actually be able to point at, well, what's the actual relevant data to the problem we're dealing with? And as that problem changes, can we grab new data and have it available almost instantly. And that's an essential problem. So for us, it's the privacy, it's that data side, and providing a clean ability to bring the three kinds of data together securely.

11:41Mike Prorock: And then the last piece is actually being AI first. There's a lot of people that will talk about that. We actually live that top to bottom in our organization. So our development cycle, it's something we had an exec meetup this week, I was talking to the team a bit about how periodically throughout a company history, you get these proud founder moments. And a couple of weeks ago, I was sitting in on one of our calls. We do these walkthroughs where we'll have someone that's customer-facing or outside world-facing chatting with someone on our product team and chatting with one of our engineers. The output of that is code, literally.

12:25Mike Prorock: just by that conversation and screen share happening. And let's look at the app, talk to our problem, and it's immediately being processed, analyzed, cross-checked against all of our systems requirements, all of our business requirements. And the next day, you're sitting there and looking at updates into the application to reflect the problem that was being described. That's amazing to me. So when we talk about being AI first, it's like we live that as a company from non-technical users all the way down into the engineer, all working in a shared common workspace. And as a result of knowing AI so well, we're able to build our systems and our data around the actual things that are needed for AI to work.

13:09Mike Prorock: When you're interacting with our system, even if it looks like a traditional dashboard or it looks like a network graph analysis, underneath that is literal teams of AI agents that are all collaborating and working together and communicating the same way you would task out a group of folks inside your organization, right? You've got your data science folks, your procurement analysts, your, you know, math walks, right? You get all those folks working together virtually and being able to do that at scale, thousands of these things running at a time and solving real problems. That's huge. Yeah. Yeah.

13:47Jim Cahalan: Lots of great points of differentiation. And, you know, as we mentioned right there are there's lots of tools out there and lots of procurement teams have multiple tools now across like their whole stack right so i'm even just curious to hear where does trade verified sit in that kind of larger procurement tech ecosystem

14:07Mike Prorock: yeah it's uh you know it's interesting we can we kind of it really does depend a bit on the organization and how they employ us right because we've come in and work directly at the procurement side. We've come in and act, I think, really importantly as a bridge between like legal and procurement and then some of the business ops planning side. Right. And part of the reason that that's important, that kind of self-learning loop we have built in with our agents where they're continuously learning inside the org and getting better. Well, that's one of those things that helps you break silos down.

14:40Mike Prorock: And when we look at creating value inside of an organization, It's capturing the knowledge we have. It's our procurement team. Procurement team A might know something that B doesn't. Right. So how do we link those things? So that's one aspect. Then making sure it's in line with, you know, whatever policies are in place. Right. So providing that horizontal breaking of silos. But also importantly, the vertical side, right? When we look at like an executive decision maker, they have to know what it before they get that call from the board, right? You know, what's actually happening, right? What's happening in the world?

15:15Mike Prorock: How is it actually impacting our business or oftentimes not, right? Hey, we don't need to worry about this. They need to know why. And they need to know that immediately. And we can consistently deliver that information in a highly relevant manner without overloading users with all sorts of extraneous alerts about things that don't matter. So we really do see usage kind of across multiple points. And part of that is because we took this notion that other things are going to exist, and that's a good thing, and we should integrate directly with those things and plug directly in via MCP or APIs. Okay.

15:51Jim Cahalan: So, yeah, it's interesting to hear. it's not just procurement using this tool. And I really liked that phrase you said, you know, it's actually a tool to help break down silos between procurement and the rest of the organization.

16:03Mike Prorock: Yeah. Yeah. That's a, it's a really essential part because a lot of times, you know, procurement sometimes gets thought of the way like corporate IT gets thought of, like, this is a cost center. No one really cares. You know, no one's really paying attention until there's a problem. Then it becomes very apparent what the value is. Part of what actually needs to be conveyed and can be conveyed with a tool like ours is that ability to say, here's the actual value we're delivering. Here's the actual savings. Here's how it translates to some literal percentage of CapEx or OpEx. That's when you can actually move the needle and say, yeah, you should be investing in this.

16:39Mike Prorock: You should be investing in our thinking about how to change our procurement operations and transform them because it's going to help the overall business grow and meet our shareholders needs.

16:51Jim Cahalan: Yeah, I want to actually follow that thread a little bit. When you're thinking about your core customer base, what do you normally see or what do they tell you about the ROI or impact that they have? What is most important to them? Is it the savings? Is it the visibility? Is that breaking down silos? What are you hearing?

17:09Mike Prorock: Yeah, great question. I think visibility and accuracy and visibility is just kind of a table stakes. You just got to have it, right? And it's actually a much harder problem than most people realize, right? Just because of how noisy and messy the data is. But it's, you got to have them. And we take some unique approaches that we could get into all sorts of nerds on math, graph time at some point, you know, about why you want to be operating on probabilities, right? Rather than, you know, thinking that you're somehow being precise because I've never seen a supply chain that doesn't have a warehouse.

17:43Mike Prorock: and I've never seen a warehouse that doesn't have some box unlabeled somewhere that someone forgot about, right? So that's why probabilities are essential there. But when we think about ROI, it's in a couple of areas. Like if we think about like someone sourcing at a buy desk somewhere, right? Their number one thing typically that we hear consistently is instead of making 30 phone calls to figure out what was going to be impacted because we had some weird supply shock or, you supplier was late on something i only had to make two or three and i knew exactly who to call and who was impacted in our work right and that that's a big that that alone is like just huge from that tactical on the ground side yeah um you know we've also though seen things like hey we we went through and we tied exact risk exposure you know to certain legal things that could have hit us by running afoul of one country or another's regulation.

18:39Mike Prorock: And we're able to root those things out clearly. We were able to tie that to, like in one case, we had something well into the tens of millions. Right. So that's not a small problem to go solve. Right. And to keep on top of and prevent from happening again. Right. um uh in other cases it very much is like hey we're gonna have a problem and we can avoid this right so uh we had a customer that uh was sourcing something that was primarily synthesized a chem that was primarily synthesized in two regions of china and only a couple of factories and they realized ahead of time that that was actually happening by using our system they would not have seen that bottleneck without it um they would they would have looked because of how you get into distributor networks things like that that they were had a much safer and more diverse supply than they thought and they actually went so far as to go build a factory right to go ensure that they could get this cabinet even in the event of disruptions and it paid for itself in the first shipping interruption like it just write it right out of the game so so the so it really does vary a little bit, we typically could see it tied back.

19:58Mike Prorock: One of the things I want to kind of hone in on over the next 12 months through some various case studies we're working on, things like that, is the exact percentage that we see on average, right? There's a range in there of some percentage of actual capital expenditure, especially on the supply side. And I think we should be able to hone into a pretty good number, but still a bit early for us on that. Okay.

20:20Jim Cahalan: Yeah. I mean, yeah, hearing lots of different ways teams are finding, you know, the ROI from using the tools, right? You said visibility, efficiency, of course, the savings that go along with.

20:32Mike Prorock: It's more the translation of visibility. It's not so much visibility, right? Visibility is there, but it's what do you do with that, right? How can you immediately make that valuable? Because we see a lot of visibility that's just like, hey, here's this giant graph. Yeah, we can show you that giant graph too, but it's not that. It's like, well, what does that mean, right, actually to me? So you're going to have that translation.

20:54Jim Cahalan: Oh, yeah. What are the actions you're now going to take, right? Exactly, yeah.

20:59Mike Prorock: the three we always try to distill it all the day you know it updates real time but it's typically like someone coming in in the morning what are the top three things i either need to do today or not do today right um and if you can't make it that simple like yeah it's not a worthwhile tool

21:15Jim Cahalan: yeah absolutely so okay lots of good roi that's being found by your current customer base so for For someone watching this today who might be interested in using this tool, how would you talk to them about ensuring kind of a smooth implementation? What advice would you give them for that?

21:36Mike Prorock: It really depends on the size of the org. So if you've got a very large org and you've got multiple groups, yeah, we need to make sure those people are in the room and listening, at least once you get past that initial, get it live. So that is just something you have to think about always when you're running transformation stuff. We run and have built out a pretty good 90-day plan to onboard and kind of get that transformation motion running at the larger enterprise scale. So we typically will start out there and we have these measurable checks each month along the way to say, like is this that one did this get what we thought it you know was supposed to and then two what's the value are we making sure we're documenting that value along the way so you can go out and build those cases you need to build across the organization to make sure everyone's aligned with taking an approach that says yeah we're going to start using it and think harder about some of these you know challenges and opportunities the the other side kind of on the smaller more nimble orgs that might just have a real point specific, hey, we get these three things we really care about.

22:45Mike Prorock: That stuff we typically will dive in in 30 days. Let's just set the three. What are the three things you really care about? And two weeks, you know, two to four weeks, we're going to go show you the answers to those things. And that's going to prove the value to that move forward.

22:58Jim Cahalan: Yeah, sounds like great advice. So, you know, you talked about the evolution of the company turning into Trade Verified in 2024. You know, and even in the last two years, what But what have you seen change and how is that maybe spurring any changes that you're making to this? Yeah.

23:17Mike Prorock: Yeah. I mean, the big thing, there have been a couple of big things. Obviously, the IEPA refunds now starting to come in has been tactically very helpful. Suddenly there's a budget available that people thought they had lost. Right. And so they can now step back and say, OK, and not just for us, but like just broadly, like, can I fix some of these problems? We were trying to fix all of a sudden things went a little haywire. Right. So that's been a solid thing on the positive side. I think where and how fast AI has been moving, I think that caught a lot of people by surprise that hadn't been working.

23:53Mike Prorock: Like I have been working all transformer models and stuff like that inside of Gov for a couple of years at the point that, you know, this stuff was kicking off. And I don't think a lot of people that weren't in the field realized how quick we were going to go from something that looks like a really bad chat bot to something that's like thinking and planning and orchestrating. Right. That's a pretty amazing set of capabilities to now be able to just drop right into your environment. Right. The third, I think, is the kind of that broader understanding of risk as like geopolitics changed. It's changing more.

24:34Mike Prorock: And this, therefore, is pushing things deeper in ways that we didn't expect to have to care about right off the source. I don't think anyone really expected that, you know, outside of the, you know, war college guys. Right. I don't think anyone was really expecting Iran to kind of go into this like simmer, low intensity, you know, trade trading blows back and forth. But yet, despite not being fully hot, having a major impact on trade and a major impact on certain chemical type sourcing, other key items. So those kinds of things, plus some of the regulatory back and forth type stuff we're seeing, I don't think people saw that coming.

25:15Mike Prorock: And as a result, it's forcing people to take a step back and rethink how they're doing things. initially as this was happening, right? We saw a lot of analysis paralysis, a lot of folks that would be making decisions going, I know I need to make something, but I don't necessarily want to shake stuff up until I know where it's going. Now that we're moving, it's more of like, okay, well, maybe this is the battleground we got right now. Maybe this is where we're at. And it's going to be a lot of unknowns. Now I can move forward and start to put in things that helped me make those unknown unknowns a little more clear.

25:55Mike Prorock: And that's been really good for us. We've been able to go in and really help some companies think about some hard problems. Yeah. And so those trends that you were just sharing, how is that kind of influencing what's

26:09Jim Cahalan: next for Trade Verified in terms of what you're offering in the future?

26:13Mike Prorock: Yeah, for us, we've definitely been expanding some of our agent capabilities specifically around, it's not scenario planning. It's more that kind of what if, but in the way you would do it in a war room inside of like, yep, we're grabbing the meeting of the minds. And that's because scenario planning has always failed us, right? It's always too late. It's always after the fact, right? You're always, you know, building an interface and assuming you have the data and not having the data that by the time you solve the problem, the problem's gone already, right? And so that's been one of the beautiful things.

26:46Mike Prorock: We've been able to start to emphasize more of that real-time automated, you know, agentic teams going through and saying, oh, they asked me this question. Let's go literally run this out in a bunch of different ways and come back with some possible solutions. And so that's an area we've been playing with a lot. And I think that's going to continue to get more valuable. The other area has been incorporating more of the kind of the broader business type data that is super relevant now. So, you know, ranging from like your global metrics and things like that and then being able to very accurately see cross comparisons i'm like well what's shifting in trade right are we seeing a shift in trade around you know uh you know uh take cobalt or something like that right in in a way that we know is going to shock some other thing in the system and can we see that happening close to real time right alongside our actual order and procurement data and what's impacted and the supplier data, right?

27:42Mike Prorock: Being able to automatically put that stuff together without a human having to ask for it's huge, right? That's just so it takes such cognitive load off of chasing data around so you can actually focus on the problem. And so we're trying to do much more of that, enabling the user to say, here's the problem I've got, let me get the answer quickly. Yeah.

28:01Jim Cahalan: And it's just another good example of this platform being able to break down those silos, right? And it is, yeah, because it's determined to work cross-functionally. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Well, yeah, that's really exciting to hear. So, you know, as we wrap up for anyone, you know, listening today, how, like, where can they go to find more, um, to kind of get started in, in learning more about TradeVerify? Yeah, absolutely.

28:25Mike Prorock: I mean, obviously TradeVerify.com, you can just hit our website. Um, the, uh, um, but yeah, that's probably the easiest to reach out to myself, uh, or anyone on the team. I always love getting into fun conversations as do i think pretty much everyone that's user facing carol fowler and others right um even if it's not like hey i want to work with you like tomorrow i i like to just hey let's talk through what's going on that helps me think better right um i'll also be uh out in new york for uh climate week and u.n general assembly and some other things coming up in a few weeks here um i'm there pretty much every year and i'm on a couple u.s china working groups and things like that.

29:05Mike Prorock: So, you know, if you're in the World Economic Forum circles or defense circles, I'll be around.

29:10Jim Cahalan: Yeah, good to know. Awesome. Well, thank you so much, Mike, for the opportunity to learn more about Trade Verified and its impact and, of course, unique value proposition. So thanks so much for joining.

29:21Mike Prorock: No, thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it.

29:23Jim Cahalan: Yeah. Well, and thank you to everyone who joined us to learn more. Until next time, take care. thanks for listening to this episode of procure tech insider if you found this conversation valuable you can subscribe to our procure tech specific newsletter the stack every thursday you'll get intelligence on procure tech companies market developments and insights from practitioners delivered right to your inbox to subscribe go to artofprocurement.com subscribe that's artofprocurement.com subscribe