Startup Of The Week

Startup Of The Week: Trackonomy

Trackonomy, a World Economic Forum 2019 Technology Pioneer, aims to give end-to-end visibility and control across fragmented global supply chains, helping to usher in an era of smoother, digitally-controlled shipments spanning the transportation, healthcare, industrial and manufacturing sectors.

With one platform that it claims cuts across all technologies Trackonomy says it can solve supply chain problems from spoilage to theft to safety before they start by sending real-time alarms to customers.

The two-year-old Silicon Valley company says it has “invented new technologies at price points not possible before.” Its solution — which includes visualization engines and analytics to give customers meaningful insights and alternative ways of interacting with data — allows the company to trace a product from end-to-end and give assurances about both its authenticity and condition, without the necessity of investing in infrastructure, says Erik Volkerink, Trackonomy’s CEO and former Chief Technology Officer of Flextronics. And, he says Trackonomy can do all of that at prices that are as much as 1000 times cheaper than solutions currently on the market.

To date, the company has been laser-focused on the logistics sector. Its president, Alan Gershenhorn, is a former Executive Vice President and Chief Commercial Officer of United Parcel Service (UPS) and has 38 years of global logistics industry experience

In future the company’s technology could be applied to other types of Internet of Things deployments and preventative maintenance, says Volkerink. For now, though, he says “we are working with some of the top transportation companies out there.”

Trackonomy is one of the companies named as tech pioneers by the Forum in 2019. Tech pioneers are early to growth-stage companies from around the world that are pioneering new technologies and innovations ranging from the use of artificial intelligence to fight human trafficking, driverless trucks, quantum computing systems, compostable packaging, and blockchain solutions to tackle disinformation.

About the author

Jennifer L. Schenker

Jennifer L. Schenker, an award-winning journalist, has been covering the global tech industry from Europe since 1985, working full-time, at various points in her career for the Wall Street Journal Europe, Time Magazine, International Herald Tribune, Red Herring and BusinessWeek. She is currently the editor-in-chief of The Innovator, an English-language global publication about the digital transformation of business. Jennifer was voted one of the 50 most inspiring women in technology in Europe in 2015 and 2016 and was named by Forbes Magazine in 2018 as one of the 30 women leaders disrupting tech in France. She has been a World Economic Forum Tech Pioneers judge for 20 years. She lives in Paris and has dual U.S. and French citizenship.