Veridion, founded as Soleadify (and still listed as such on Snowflake, Datarade, and Nomad Data), was founded to help companies access and maintain accurate and reliable data on their current and potential supply base. Like other supplier discovery / data companies, it is constantly crawling the web looking for suppliers, related news, and sentiment, but unlike some other supplier discovery / data companies, it doesn’t use third party data subscriptions and only includes verified B2B suppliers in its database.
Let’s drill into that last point as it is a differentiator between Veridion and some other supplier data / discovery providers.
- First of all, it verifies every single supplier it includes is active in a(n open) government registry. Most countries in the world (with the exception of China) make all of their corporate registration databases globally available, and they use these databases as a foundation.
- Second, key data points for that supplier are only retrieved from verified sources (including global corporate registries, the suppliers web site, once tied to a registration, or profile sites they are known to maintain on business and social networks).
- Third, all key data points for every supplier in its database are verified on a weekly basis, ensuring that any critical corporate, financial, product, technology, service or ESG data field you pull from its database is at most a week old.
- Fourth, for fields that can be / are estimated (like revenue, employee count, etc.), it will tag the field as such. (When explicit financial statements are not available, sophisticated modelling using benchmarks, industry comparisons, employee count, geographic location, publicized deals and associated revenue numbers, third party revenue estimates, etc. is deployed and tagged as such.)
- Fifth, all source data it uses is cached for quick verification / full-text search for supplier discovery.
- Sixth, it scrubs all B2C businesses that would never be a supplier. Many of it’s peers claim 2X, 3X, and even 5X the number of “vendor” records in their database, but they are not actually B2B vendors you would actually use as you need to remember that the coffee shop on the corner, the pizza joint on the next block, etc. are all registered businesses in the registry that these “supplier data” platforms suck in, but not suppliers you’d ever use! (And while a very small number of them might appear on the T&E registry, you don’t want these coming up in a supplier search you’re paying for, and you don’t need detailed data on them.) Veridion removes all of these B2C cafes, restaurants, grocery stores, retail stores, etc. etc. etc. from its database to ensure that searches bring back real business suppliers, not random entities. (And by limiting its database to just real B2B suppliers, it is able to validate all of the key data in its entire database every week!)
- Seventh, it’s highly accurate. Most customers who use their supplier validation and enrichment services see a 90%+ match-rate with their current database. (One of their most recent projects saw a 97.2% match rate which included considerably more accurate Australian vendor mapping for a client whose last provider couldn’t identify almost 22,000 suppliers used by the business.)
- Eighth, because of it’s validated data approach, it is able to maintain all parent/child/sibling relationships with high accuracy and give you a lot of corporate relationship insight into the supplier which might also include partners and resellers.
Moreover, all of this is available through the API. They are an API first company, as they expect to be plugged into your supplier management / ERP / sourcing platform for enrichment, validation, and discovery. (They are already plugged into Coupa, Exiger, Everstream, and Market Dojo and will likely be announcing more partners later in the year.)
That being said, they do have their own supplier discovery platform where you can do searches, preview results, refine, and then, when you are ready, accept, review, and export data for import into your sourcing platform(s) (or, if there’s a direct integration, push into those platforms). If you’ve been following SI, or keeping up with the supplier search and data market, you probably have a good idea how this works, but there’s one key difference between Veridion and other platforms that we want to drill into first — Preview.
When you do a search, which can be free text (and they will use semantic AI to parse your request) or a set of specified key requirements (location/proximity, product, size by employee base or revenue, NAICS, DEI, ESG, certification or other requirements expressible as keywords), it returns the results in preview mode which, in addition to telling you how many companies were identified, (provided you turn stats on) breaks down the geographical distribution, industry classification, tag frequency, supplier type (manufacturer, distributor, or services provider), and company size of the identified potential supply base in addition to giving you full details on the top two suppliers. At this point, you can accept the results and see the details on all of the suppliers or, if the stats look off or the top two matches don’t look anything like what you are searching for, revise the search or start a new one. It does this because it uses a consumption-based model where you only pay for the data you access, believes that you shouldn’t be charged for results you don’t want, and recognizes that, at least until you are familiar with the platform, it will take you a few tries to get the search right (as it typically does even when you use Google). Moreover, it knows that if you’re never going to send an RFQ to more than 10 suppliers, you probably don’t need to research more than the top 20 to 30 suppliers if you get a good match rate, so you don’t want a 300+ data set as a result, and want to refine that down until you have a high probability of good matches (and then if the number is still too high, you can simply just select the top X results).
We need to break down the search capability, but to do that, we need to breakdown the data records. Veridion is meant to be a corporate supplier data validation engine and higher level supplier discovery tool. It’s not meant to be a low-level ultra-specific manufacturer or factory discovery platform where you need very specific capabilities like Find My Factory or a 360-degree profiler where it looks at all third party information related to a supplier so you can build up a market profile like Forestreet. It was specifically designed to be an affordable, consumption based, supplier data enrichment and discovery platform for business who:
- have a large, aging/not maintained, supplier master where they need to validate every entity in that master, normalize multiple entries, and remove inactive vendors
- need to maintain data on currently active suppliers on registration, certification, and/or ESG (for example) on a regular basis
- need to do discovery internal to their organization — when Veridion is integrated with the organization’s supplier master, it can restrict discovery to vendors the organization is currently doing business with (through another team at another location for a product in a different category) and help the organization understand which suppliers have more potential to the organization
- need to do supplier discovery across a wide range or industries, requirements, markets and geographies — in addition to being strong in North American and European supplier discovery and enrichment, they are also very strong across AustralAsia/Oceania, Latin America, and the Middle East
- need high level information to make decisions as a third party; for example, they have a product specifically for the insurance industry to help them quantify factoring and supply chain risk
- need the right (location, etc.) data to identify the right data to use for Scope 3 calculations as well as data on statements/commitments the companies have made to ESG/Scope 3 (and have an API that supports ESG initiatives and can be integrated with players like carbmee)
Let’s dive into ESG. They have a few capabilities here to be aware of:
- ESG Performance Evaluations by way of an overall ESG Score, ESG Pillar Scores and 26 granular Risk Criteria Scores along with corresponding ESG descriptions & score justifications
- Regulatory Compliance Support to identify suppliers who comply with specific corporate ESG regulations such as CSRD, the EU Taxonomy, CBAM, and CSDD
- Climate Resilience Support via data designed to identify physical assets for climate risk screening, support climate scenario modelling, and identify supply chain facilities at high risk for (climate) disruption
- Ethical & Sustainable Sourcing Support through the identification of publicized commitments to sustainable practices, confirmed compliance with ESG regulations, and the ESG scorecard
Compared to some of the other discovery platforms, their generic approach to supplier capability tracking via tagging makes them especially suited for for companies that need to find distributors, CPG providers, and services providers, since you are always searching for these companies by (finished/consumption ready) product type or service type, and their semantic search capability will automatically search for all equivalent terms when you create a search.
For every supplier, it maintains key legal, ownership, location, technographics (technology known to be used by the company), sustainability information (commitments, news, metrics, and scores), and products (UNSPSC) and services, summary data, and tags. Summary data is an AI-generated description of the company, offerings, capabilities, and certifications and tags (for which they identify over 4M tag variations) represent key supplier offerings/features across products, services, technologies, certifications, or capabilities auto-identified using semantic technology. Tags allow them to capture, with high probability, unique aspects or attributes of the supplier without having deep models for every industry, category, and product type; lead to more accurate searches; and make the platform more usable as a generic discovery platform.
If you’re looking for a supplier enrichment/maintenance/discovery platform that can plug into your existing supplier management / sourcing infrastructure, and especially if you are in a distribution / consumer sale / services vertical, Veridion is a platform you should look at.
If it’s used by the likes of Everstream Analytics (last Series B round was 50M), Exiger (valuation at last investment round was 1.2B), and Experian (30B market cap), then you know there is value there.