Fintech and supply chain startup Kountable launches its managed marketplace for global trade at BootstrapLabs AI conference

Kountable, a fintech startup creating the world’s most inclusive supply chains via its an end-to-end platform, today announced the launch of its managed marketplace for global trade at BootstrapLabs Applied Artificial Intelligence Conference. The global marketplace, which focuses on collaboration in the supply chain, bringing together SMEs, multinational suppliers and end customers onto a single platform, harnesses the massively transformative capabilities of entrepreneurs in emerging markets who are solving some of the world’s biggest problems.

Founded in 2014 by Christopher Hale, Kountable’s marketplace connects local entrepreneurs in developing countries with multinational suppliers and top-quality goods that are then delivered to end payers such as governments, NGOs or corporations looking to complete large scale projects. Kountable, based in San Francisco, launched in Rwanda in 2015 and now has offices in Rwanda, Kenya, Ghana, and the US.

Kountable marketplace also focuses on aggregating the demand side in trade and how this has resulted in accessing previously unpenetrable markets and meeting sustainable development goals of multilateral organizations such as government agencies, The World Economic Forum and the UN, to name a few.

“The Global South is home to some of the fastest growing economies on the planet, despite being crippled by a general lack of traditional infrastructure, scarcity of information, trade frictions, political and currency risks or even corruption,” said CEO of Kountable, Cris Hale.

“Nevertheless, the benefits to bringing the next billion people into the global trade economy outweigh the risks and massive investments are being made in infrastructure, healthcare, IT, and transportation by governments, and other global organizations like the UN, Red Cross, World Bank, The Gates Foundation, or Buffet Foundation.”

Kountable is making this possible by building a data acquisition, normalization, and scoring platform that measures the behaviors of the best trades and their traders in these emerging markets. With unique data describing the last mile of the supply chain and unique data on the traders in these developing markets, Kountable is building behavioral analysis for historical and live-updating trader behaviors, NLP to analyze the type of goods being requested/provided, matching algorithms to identify best-fit for traders and trade opportunities, time-series analysis on historic FX rates and fluctuation patterns, image recognition to automatically recognize and categorize key documentation, as well as SNA to assess reliability and competency of traders and buyers without traditional “scoring” mechanisms.

“We’re leveraging machine learning and artificial intelligence to help us find, resource, train, grow and promote these traders who are generally small and medium enterprises (SMEs),” said Danielle Russell, VP of Product at Kountable. “These traders are the engines of growth in these rapidly growing economies and connect the largest buyers in these economies to the top suppliers and brands in the world and are literally the point of access to global commerce for their respective countries.”