What is your company doing?

Doing business responsibly is now a mainstream issue, and we empower better business through traceability. Global supply chains are huge emitters of greenhouse gases, with a lack of transparency in terms of raw product sourcing and the ethics around it. Our mission is traceability and due diligence of raw materials, from source to manufacturer, with a particular focus (currently) on minerals used in electric vehicles and consumer electronics. To achieve this, we’re using blockchain alongside traditional databases and machine learning to establish a new global standard for ethically and sustainably sourced minerals. How? By reliably giving a commodity an identity and tracking supply chain data, including greenhouse gas emissions data, along the journey from the mine to consumption.

How and when did you get started?

I was running BT’s defence and security business and launched their cybersecurity business in around 2010. At that time, I was working with lots of cryptographers who were getting excited about something called ‘bitcoin’. Unfortunately, I didn’t buy into bitcoin, but it did get me wondering about the underlying technology of blockchain and whether it might cross over into a real-world use case. This was the first germ of an idea. Then, from 2015 to 2016 I began talking with people about the potential for blockchain combined with other technologies to be applied to different problems, like the lack of transparency and trust in supply chains.

By early 2017, my co-founder Veera Johnson and I were looking at the universe of possible use cases where there was a problem of scale not yet being effectively addressed, but with the likelihood, for them to grow in prominence. The timing had to be good in terms of need and demand, perhaps driven by consumer concern. But we recognised that the real driver of change would be industrial brands, sometimes encouraged by regulation or institutional capital, that were being asked to find different ways of doing business. Environmental, social and governance (ESG) concerns are increasingly a board room issue, with institutional investors demanding a demonstration of tangible progress, primarily around sustainability. This was our starting point.

How did you go from an idea to your focus on global industrial supply chains?

We picked a very specific use case, that of tracking cobalt in the lithium-ion battery supply chain. We recognised that this would become increasingly important in the energy transition, for example, the adoption of electric vehicles. 60% of the world’s mined cobalt comes from the Congo where there are significant concerns such as forced or child labour, the funding of armed groups, smuggling, etc. A complex industrial supply chain gave us our use case for greater transparency at every stage of the cobalt journey. We’d already heard of supply chain tracking in the food chain, for example of lettuces from farm to shelf, but that was easier because the commodity doesn’t change on its journey along the supply chain. Raw material like cobalt undergoes refining, amalgamation with other materials and is then used to make components that eventually find their way into a car. This type of industrial supply chain is an order of magnitude more complex than tracking boxes of lettuce.

This is a hugely topical subject – can you expand on that?

In January this year, the World Economic Forum published a report called Net-Zero Challenge: The supply chain opportunity. This stated, “Supply-chain decarbonization will be a ‘game-changer’ for the impact of corporate climate action.” The timing of this report was interesting in that it followed the global Covid-19 lockdowns. Research suggests that the first lockdown resulted in just a 7% reduction in global greenhouse gas emissions. Why so low? Because we were all still consuming what we already consumed, so global supply chains kept going.  As the report points out: “Engaging an often-fragmented supplier landscape is challenging – especially when emissions are ‘buried’ deep in the supply chain, or when addressing them might require collective action at the industry level.” At Circulor, we see our mission as digging up the buried data on emissions.

How did you scale your business?

We had our first fields trials in Rwanda, tracking tantalum (a conflict mineral). Regulations demand that conflict minerals must be tracked from the mines through to the end manufacturer and we enabled this using blockchain technology. This was about showing how we could give manufacturers the data they needed to demonstrate responsibility along the supply chain.

At the end of 2018/early 2019, we started a pilot project for Volvo Cars tracking cobalt in their battery supply chain. This led to our first long-term contract with Volvo and today we have several other car manufacturers and consumer electronics companies as customers. So, our journey has taken us from a germ of an idea about how and where new technology might be applied, to today where we are the market leader in this field.