Maturity Matrix of European Supply Chain Start-ups 2024

In recent years, there has been a significant decline in the number of supply chain start-ups appearing in Europe. According to Mathias Bosse, compiler of the Supply Chain Tech Report, one of the reasons is that companies are currently less inclined to serve as launching customers. However, he expects the rise of generative AI to lead to a new wave of tech companies. Supply Chain Media’s annual Maturity Matrix contains a number of these new start-ups.

The market of tech companies in logistics and supply chain has really taken off over the past decade. “Corporate executives and investment funds started to realize how super-important supply chains actually are for the economy, and how vulnerable they are to disruptions and other forms of uncertainty,” explains Bosse, who is also the founder of German company Prequel Ventures, which invests in supply chain start-ups. “At the same time, there are lots of smart people with innovative ideas and technology to meet these pressing needs in the supply chain. Not least because existing supply chain systems at companies are no longer adequate. For supply chain planning and execution, companies still work a lot with Excel and get far too little added value from their large amount of data.”

In its search for interesting supply chain start-ups, Prequel Ventures constantly analyses the European market of new technology companies. It publishes the annual Supply Chain Tech Report containing comprehensive analysis of the European start-up ecosystem. How many new start-ups have appeared? How many have gone under, and how many have successfully gone public or been acquired by a larger company? In which subfield of supply chain management are the most start-ups, and what kind of technology do they use? “Using the underlying database, interested companies can make selections of start-ups that may be of interest to them, but that is not our main goal,” Bosse says.

European start-up en scale-up contest

Bosse is also a judge for the European Supply Chain Start-up Contest, which Supply Chain Media has organized annually since 2018 as part of the inNOWvate Supply Chain Event. To select candidates for this contest, Supply Chain Media analyses promising start-ups and positions them in a Maturity Matrix with ten categories of solutions. To arrive at this, Supply Chain Media exchanges a lot of information with Bosse to get a good overview of this rapidly developing market of start-ups in Europe.

Maturity Matrix of start-ups and scale-ups

For the seventh consecutive year, Supply Chain Media has published this Maturity Matrix of European start-ups and scale-ups that are up to five years old. This maximum age means that some start-ups and scale-ups automatically disappear from the list every year, even though they are still in the market. The maturity of these young companies in the matrix is based on age, number of employees, awards won, number of customers and, most importantly, capital raised. The overview separates start-ups from scale-ups, mainly based on a minimum financial funding of €2 million.

Like last year, the Maturity Matrix features many new start-ups with solutions for Demand Planning & Forecasting based on machine learning and other artificial intelligence. It also shows a clear eruption of new start-ups and heavily funded scale-ups in the area of Carbon Accounting. The Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) came into effect for large companies this year, forcing them to detail carbon emissions across the supply chain.

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