Startup Of The Week

Startup Of The Week: Dorae

Dorae, a World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer, enables companies to capture key data and automate supply, production and distribution information, standardize and automate document generation, gain visibility into supply chains, and open new commercial relationships. Its target customers include primary producers, manufacturers and retailers, traders, transporters, and logistics providers.

“We are entering into an era of fragmentation in global trade,” says Aba Schubert, the U.K.-based company’s CEO and co-founder. “Companies can no longer count on one centralized supplier and need better tech tools to manage their supply chains.”

The idea for creating Dorae materialized when Schubert was working with a mining company. “We wanted software to help us keep track of the locations of components in a supply chain – data about the life cycle of stuff – and we couldn’t find it,” she says.

She founded Dorae in 2014 and went to work on developing a way to make it easy for companies to buy an off-the-shelf product that provides a standardized digital log about objects and the things that happen to them. “All the finished products that companies have, they all have a lot of ingredients with individual lifecycles, and then they begin to have combined life cycles, “says Schubert.  Dorae’s system catches key information, combines it, and keep it for when it is useful. It can, for example, give companies a vision into the multitiers of their supply chain, reveal the provenance of materials and whether they are recyclable, but also give them insights into where their goods are and, if there is a quality control issue, where the output from the batch was distributed, she says.

Think of it as logistics reconciliation and a reliable way to track ESG metrics, says Schubert. Today some of the information about materials is recorded on spreadsheets or logged with GPS coordinates. Some is not recorded at all. “Most information about the world is not captured so our first step is to manually input it,” she says.

Dorae’s current focus is on helping companies build the right datasets by structuring and preserving the right information. It later plans to add analytical capabilities with AI to help companies predict outcomes. “When you are building a house, first you need the foundation – the basic access to information – then you can start thinking about doing more complicated things with the data,” she says.

While someone internally with some technical knowhow will need to design the templates to build datasets that meet an individual company’s needs, Dorae’s off-the-shelf software has a user-friendly user interface that makes it easy for employees to log materials in a standardized digital format, says Schubert.

Competitors include large IT companies like SAP and Microsoft  that build custom solutions for large corporate customers. Dorae says it offers a number of advantages: it can be installed quickly, does not require a lot of IT department resources or employee training, and it can be easily updated or tweaked to reflect changes in company processes, she says.

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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.