Celebrating 1 year since our beta launch!
Today marks the one year anniversary since Helios launched its first beta product. As I write this, I am en route to ExpoWest, where we have a booth (!) and will be showcasing our latest platform release. It has been such a privilege, for all of us, to have been on this journey and we can't wait for all the great things to come in this 2024!
Given this milestone, I wanted to take a moment to recognize not just how much Helios has accomplished, but how much technology has changed in these past 12 months. When we first launched our beta, we'd managed to build one of the world's best climate data architectures - bringing together weather station and satellite data to get daily climate information from over 14 million locations globally. We'd ingested over ten years of data for each of these locations and were able to help our customers find climate anomalies - and start to get ahead of these agricultural supply disruptions. We soon added economic indicators, including currency volatility, energy and fertilizer prices. Our customers then asked us to help them track global catastrophes (e.g., earthquakes, floods) and we realized there was no good real-time database of these disasters and how it was impacting global supply chains. So we built it from scratch - leveraging a number of signals, including scraping 500,000 news articles a day with a cutting edge NLP model, and launched the world's best catastrophe tracker.
It feels like ages ago, but genAI was still in its earlier stages - OpenAI had just announced ChatGPT+ and enterprises were beginning to test it out. Given Eden's background in AI/ML engineering, we understood the power of this technology better than most in the space. We launched Cersi, the world's first Virtual Supply Chain Analyst, in October 2023, and for the first time garnered awesome press in Inc. Magazine, AgFunder, VentureBeat, and others. Our customers kept pushing us - asking us how we could use Cersi to make their lives easier. And we heard them loud and clear. In Helios 2.0 we kept pushing the boundaries of what was technically possible, from creating weekly custom reports for each of our customers' supply chains, to tracking global commodities and predicting their prices via our Global Commodity Reports.
What have we learned so far on our journey? Three core lessons have emerged I’d say:
Build your products side-by-side with a customer, and with your users in mind: We've benefited immensely from the close partnership of folks like Coca-Cola's Bill Hovis and the team at Just Quality International, who have literally built out the product with us. Their feedback on each new design, beta, and launch has been invaluable and helps us identify problems and opportunities much faster.
genAI has not revolutionized procurement teams' way of working - yet: Most of the procurement teams we work with prefer receiving a Weekly Insight, or Global Commodity Report, via email - which they then incorporate into their existing ways of working (e.g., talking about it on their Monday morning meeting). Few have wanted to engage daily with Cersi, in essence not seeing her as a "true" procurement analyst. We expect this to change over the years, as technology continues to mature and leaders become more comfortable with fully autonomous genAI procurement analysts.
Data continues to become cheaper and more widely available - the value is in the insights: We've been huge beneficiaries of the increased availability of all kinds of data, from detailed climate metrics to soil type indicators. At the same time, compute costs have decreased dramatically, which has allowed companies like ours to create better insights in real-time. As we continue to see this dramatic increase in data availability and cheaper compute, the real value of companies like ours will be in the level and predictiveness of our insights.
So what’s next for Helios AI?
We'll continue to improve our dashboard, adding more usability, real-time alerts, and insights than ever before!
Political risk is coming! Stay tuned for our Q2 launch of political risk scoring - which will allow you to track risks like tariffs, export restrictions, civil unrest, and more!
Economic risk will get even better - get ready for more information on wage growth, inflation, and even commodity pricing!
And more (so make sure to follow us on LinkedIn)!
As always, we are most grateful for the trust that our customers put in us every day to help you get ahead of supply disruptions. Thank you!
- Francisco Martin-Rayo, CEO/Co-Founder of Helios
