Venu, tell us a bit about Tag-N-Trac!
Tag-N-Trac was founded with a mission to simplify/repeatable/low-cost supply chain edge data acquisition. We want to address the $500B Pharma and Food safety supply chain inefficiencies. Pain points are mainly categorized into excess inventory, wastage due to non-compliance of temperatures, and fragmented data that makes it hard to meet regulatory compliance.
We started with core team:
CEO, Co-Founder – Venu Gutlapalli
CTO, Co-Founder – Joseph Reddy
VP of Systems – Gary Leung
Venu Gutlapalli, CEO (left); Joseph Reddy, CTO (right)
Of our co-founders, I spent 20+ years at wireless leaders like Qualcomm Inc. and Atheros Inc., commercializing Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and Location technologies from cradle to commercial launch, and scaled multiple products to billions of volume and revenue. I built and managed global teams working with world’s leading mobile and IoT companies.
Our CTO Joseph Reddy, spent 16 years at Texas Instruments, and has experience in RF IC and software development. Joseph is an expert in leading teams in the development of software, low power system architecture. He has a PhD in Electrical Engineering from UC San Diego.
Why did you choose to found Tag-N-Trac?
I was looking at Qualcomm IoT scalability for broad market and realized that a single software or hardware can’t be applied to every vertical to meet the cost structure for enterprise customers to see Realization of Value (RoV). Each vertical needs a silicon and software cost optimized to solve their problem and increase efficiency. With that vision we started Tag-N-Trac to develop a fully optimized Real-Time visibility platform for Supply Chain and Logistics
What problems in the industry were you seeing?
The industry was offered with a lot of cloud platforms, with no underlying edge computing solutions for consistent and repeatable end to end solutions.
Congratulations on recently raising your $10M Series A! How do you plan on utilizing the funds?
Our primary focus now is talent acquisition and low-cost process development.
Check out Tag-N-Trac’s job openings here: https://www.tagntrac.com/careers/
Where do you see your industry headed and what trends are you most excited about?
With supply disruption events on the daily news these past couple of years, industry has finally realized that real time visibility and traceability (RTVT), by enabling traceability from SKU level to Container level feeding into control towers on an hourly basis, is powerful. This is especially true when you consider the trillions of SKU, pallets, and containers crisscrossing the world – you have quite a big data problem!
What have you found to be the biggest benefit of joining the EvoNexus incubator?
From the beginning days, EvoNexus mentors believed in our vision and helped us stay focused. We had to refine over and over our business model and value proposition for both our initial customers and investors till we got it right.
To learn more about Tag-N-Trac, check out their website: https://www.tagntrac.com/
Venu Gutlapalli’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/venugutlapalli/
