Sen. Warner lauds supply chain work of Arlington’s first billion dollar startup

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A Ballston-based tech firm is on the “cutting and bleeding” edge of supply chain issues facing the country, Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) said during a visit to the company late last month.

Supply chains have become an international focus, with the shortage of personal protective equipment at the beginning of the pandemic, competition in manufacturing computer chips, and global impacts of Russian goods bans fresh in people’s minds.

“Knowing how supply chains work, this has become the buzzword of the time,” Warner said in an employee town hall at Interos — the first private Arlington startup to reach a billion-dollar valuation. Warner’s visit to the company was “to highlight Northern Virginia’s growing role as a hub of tech innovation for national security,” his staff said.

Work that companies like Interos do, identifying companies’ suppliers, is particularly important as the war in Ukraine continues, Warner said. He’s working on legislation that would mandate public sector companies of a certain size to map out their supply chains, he said. The timeliest measures would focus on identifying Russian companies, as countries ban imports on its goods and raw materials.

“If you can’t go upstream and find where that product originates and who’s in the supply chain, you’re not going to be able to bring the full power of sanctions on a country,” he said.

Interos uses artificial intelligence to map out the suppliers of their clients and assess the risk scores of each. Its platform is used by federal agencies and Fortune 500 companies.

Interos Founder and CEO Jennifer Bisceglie said there is “a very good environment” for Warner’s proposed legislation.

“A lot of companies are truly trying to understand where they are connected to Russia and not being able to comply with sanctions,” she said, adding that companies “want to be able to answer these questions.”

Bisceglie added that Interos could provide supply chain knowledge to those companies.

“It’s all about understanding what’s happening in the sub-tiers of your supply chain and that’s where we help,” she said.

Bisceglie said Interos raised $100 million last year to work on getting more data faster that would provide “more interesting and pro-active insights” to their customers. These new data include a supplier’s cybersecurity and financial information.

“So this is all about speed, about unique datasets, and really to solve global transparency challenges on a global scale,” she said.

Warner also called China “the threat of our time” at the town hall.

“The challenge going forward is going to be who wins the technology struggle for the 21st century,” he said.