Find My Factory was founded in 2022 to help Global companies who wanted to bring
manufacturing back from China to Europe with a solution to find local manufacturers to meet their needs. Having raised approximately 1M USD in pre seed funding, they have established a customer base in Europe, and recently broadened the scope to provide suppliers from the entire world. Find My Factory has their HQ in Stockholm, Sweden.

It helps its customers find potential new suppliers and manufacturing locations via near real-time search on both its constantly growing supplier database and its ability to constantly web-scan for new suppliers that might be relevant for your business. It currently has over 10 Million suppliers in its database which is growing on every supplier search.

The platform is very straightforward to use in a four-step process:

0.Upload

Upload the database of products (from a flat Excel/CSV file) for which you are searching for new suppliers and start by selecting the first product of interest, kicking off a new search project.

1. Enrich

Augment the key product data with additional requirements you have for your suppliers, like location, category, keywords of interest, and other key attributes supported by the platform. When you are happy with the specifications, you can move to the sourcing phase.

2. Source

The platform will scour its database, scour over 240 starting data sources on the web (which is a number that is growing daily), create a starting list of suppliers, pull in their website and related data, parse the data, and create a list of potentially matching suppliers, starting at around the 40% potential match range, ordered with the highest potential match listed first.

As part of the research phase, a buyer can select up to 3 topics which will be researched using focussed, custom, agents to enrich the profiles brought back. Right now they support 9 primary topics, with more coming in future releases:

• Financial Information: create a complete financial profile (revenue, profitability, financial health, etc.)
• Production Facilities: where; key machines, capabilities and products
• Certificates: what certifications the company has
• Competitor Analysis: who are the main competitors based on the product
• Credit Score: bring back the company’s credit rating and associated backing
• Concern Structure: determine the corporate structure and ownership/investment
• Sales Contacts: identify the head sales contacts and their current contact information
• Reference Clients: customers, public testimonials, and their websites/corporate info
• Company Active: is the company currently operating, and last indications thereof

Each of these agents brings back data in a standardized, structured format that is easily compared, searched, and ranked.

From this starting list of suppliers, a buyer can check out the initial profiles and create a short list for further research.

3. Engage

In the engage engine, the full starting profiles are brought in under the project and the buyer can kick off additional research questions if needed, further refine it’s requirements (and location parameters), make notes on the supplier to share with her team (who can do the same), see available actions (i.e. what external data sources are available such as Google, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc. for supplier information), and then select a starting list of suppliers for engaging with.

To make it easy to determine which suppliers/manufacturers the buyer wants to start with, the platform summarizes how many of the requirements appear to have been met (based on available data) in a colour-coded fashion (with hover-over to allow a buyer to quickly see which requirements do not appear to be met). Once a buyer has selected a starting list, the buyer can export the list to Excel/CSV for import into their sourcing system.

All of the projects are archived in the system, to make future research efforts for (re) sourcing easy, as well as an audit trail for the justification of why a new supplier was invited.

Even though the platform only launched late last year, additional features of the platform include:

• multiple workspaces: which can be customized to department, product category, etc.
• search settings: you can determine how deep to search potential data sources (websites, directory profiles, etc.) and how wide to extend the search (sources most likely to contain relevant suppliers or data to sources least likely)
• custom research agents: you can define your own research agents that you can train over time (by using the same agent across multiple research projects); for example, if you are concerned about brand, you can train one to determine if the manufacturer has bad press

The platform is being built to support any company that needs to find a new company, regardless of manufacturing need, and is currently serving (and targeting) automotive, industrial, and retail customers. While it’s search and match capabilities are not as deep as platforms that specialize in a single industry or on a single manufacturing type, and its profiles not as extensive as supplier discovery platforms designed to build extensive market intelligence profiles, it was built to solve a need — generic supplier discovery at an affordable price point for the mid-market (for teams willing to do the research required to narrow suggestions down to potential candidates).

By asking the right questions (and creating the right research parameters), the buyer can use the platform to narrow in on suppliers more likely than not to meet the organization’s requirements. For example, if you know your machine and tooling requirements for a custom part, it can look for manufacturers that advertise the capabilities. If you have specific material requirements for your consumer product, you can specify the material requirements (tempered glass, aluminum lids for your jars) and it will look for suppliers that have those materials on their site.

It’s not perfect, as the supplier might not have the metrology, capacity, or expertise for something outside the norm, but if you can get 70% or more on the accuracy, that means seven out of ten recommendations are valid and you won’t waste a lot of time researching inappropriate suppliers. If you’re a mid-market company that can’t afford a custom solution per category, this is still a significant improvement over not having anything, and cuts weeks (or months of research) down to hours, and maybe days at most. Thus, if you’re a mid-market that needs an affordable supplier discovery platform that works, be sure to check out Find My Factory.