Icix has raised $25 million to improve global product supply chain safety

Icix, a startup that makes it easier to track and test consumer products, has raised $25 million in a third round of funding. The San Francisco company helps companies form business networks that share information with trading partners. Over the past four years, the company has been working on Direct Test, which ties together data from 300,000 product safety testing laboratory sources around the world. Icix wants to be able to verify test records for millions of products. “The network tests, inspects, and certifies different aspects of the supply chain,” Matt Smith, cofounder and chief strategy officer of Icix, told VentureBeat in an interview. “We spent time integrating with the big lab systems so we can gather the data directly from the sources through these lab networks. If I am buying a product from a particular trading partner, we can trace it back to where it was tested and when it was tested.”

Tainted peanut butter, rotten eggs, bacteria-ridden fruits and vegetables, and chemically compromised merchandise are literally the spoils of the globalization of industry, and the bane of the big businesses that sell most people the food they eat and products they buy. For years, companies promised to manage and monitor the process of provisioning for global retailers with tools that would make consumer goods safer and the supply chain that provides them more reliable, but the hits just keep on coming. Stepping into the breach with a suite of new products including a hosted service that connects retailers with inspection companies to automate risk management, iCix, a San Francisco-based company with over a decade of experience in food safety and supply chain management, has raised $25 million. The company spends most of its time focused on selling its suite of technology services to general merchandisers like Wal-Mart or the giant Australian conglomerate Wesfarmers (which is like a combination of Cargill, General Electric, and Wal-Mart in a single company). “We started this in the food industry after 9/11,” says Matt Smith, the chief strategy officer at iCix. “Food companies needed to understand where their products came from. What we did was give them a very clear way for how the products they’re buying are coming from the manufacturing places where they’re made.” Now, in addition to tracking a network of suppliers, iCix is integrating that information with its tools tracking the monitoring work that’s being done by independent testing companies around the world. “There’s an army of lab companies that have been the verifiers of trade,” says Smith. Ever since ships began calling at ports in the world, technicians, auditors, or merchants have been around to verify that the goods coming off of a boat were the goods that businesses had paid for.