Supply chain management isn’t sexy. And yet, it’s the exact kind of company thesis that gets us going at Unicorner.

Craft is leveraging AI to build the ultimate intelligence layer for supply chains. It’s automation in spaces like these that can (and will) make all the difference compared to those who keep things manual.

Arek and Ethan 🦄

Craft is building an AI-powered intelligence platform that helps governments and large enterprises monitor and manage their global supply chains. The company aggregates and structures data from millions of businesses, suppliers, people, products, and locations to create what it calls a living knowledge graph of the global economy. For organizations that depend on complex supply chains, even a single supplier disruption can delay production, increase costs, create regulatory issues, or expose critical operations to cybersecurity and geopolitical risks. Craft continuously analyzes thousands of data sources to identify supplier risks before they become major problems. The platform gives customers visibility into supplier financial health, cybersecurity posture, geopolitical exposure, foreign ownership, ESG performance, mergers and acquisitions, sanctions, and other operational risks.

Check it out: global.craft.co

Craft operates as an enterprise SaaS platform, selling annual software subscriptions to governments and large organizations, including defense agencies, aerospace companies, manufacturers, and other critical infrastructure organizations where resilient supply chains are essential to day-to-day operations.

Customers pay based on the number of suppliers they monitor and the capabilities they require. As organizations expand the number of suppliers they track, annual contract values increase, creating a highly scalable recurring revenue model.

Craft founder Ilya Levtov immigrated to the U.S. as a child. He studied Arts and English at Columbia University and cello at The Juilliard School before beginning his career in investment banking at Goldman Sachs. He later earned his MBA from Stanford Graduate School of Business.

He didn’t stay in finance, though, because he joined SpotRunner, an online advertising technology startup, as an early employee. There, Levtov helped scale the company from 10 to 200 employees in just 18 months. He later worked in venture capital at Venrock, where he gained firsthand experience evaluating emerging technology companies, before joining the anime streaming platform Crunchyroll as EVP of finance, operations, and business development. During his time there, Crunchyroll grew into one of the world’s largest anime streaming platforms before being acquired by The Chernin Group in 2013.

Around 2015, Levtov noticed a problem he had encountered throughout his career: there was no reliable source of truth for understanding companies. Basic questions like where a business operated, who owned it, what products it made, or how it connected to other organizations often required searching dozens of disconnected websites.

To solve this, Craft initially built large-scale web crawlers to collect and organize structured company information. The platform attracted millions of monthly users through Google Search, but the business model remained unclear.

Everything changed when a major aerospace and defense company approached Craft, seeking help understanding its supplier network. The project quickly expanded from a pilot into a contract worth around $500,000 annually. Soon afterward, the U.S. Air Force and the Pentagon reached out with similar needs, validating that supply chain intelligence represented a much larger opportunity than company search alone. 

That customer demand ended up transforming Craft into the enterprise supply chain intelligence platform it is today.

The global economy runs on supply chains, yet most organizations have surprisingly little visibility into them. Many companies know who they purchase from, but far fewer understand who supplies those suppliers, or whether hidden risks exist several layers deep within the supply chain. In recent years, factors like the COVID-19 pandemic and geopolitical tensions have made the lack of visibility increasingly costly. Geopolitical tensions rank as the top risk facing supply chains for the second consecutive year.

Craft is building the infrastructure to solve that problem. Customers upload the suppliers they want to monitor, and Craft aggregates data from 20+ pipelines into 250,000+ supplier attributes, tracking everything from financial health and cybersecurity posture to sanctions, foreign ownership, mergers, and geopolitical exposure. 

Rather than manually researching suppliers one by one, procurement and risk teams receive a centralized view of their supplier network, along with AI-generated insights that surface potential risks before they become operational disruptions. For example, if a manufacturer relies on a supplier that is acquired by a foreign-owned company or begins showing signs of financial distress, Craft can flag that change early, giving the customer time to investigate or identify alternative suppliers.

That proactive approach appears to create meaningful customer value. According to the company, one customer, T-Mobile, reduced supplier research time from three hours to seven minutes, while organizations regularly uncover critical supplier risks that would otherwise have gone unnoticed.

Craft also benefits from a strong competitive position. Winning customers across the U.S. Department of Defense and more than 40 government agencies creates significant credibility, particularly in industries where trust and data quality matter most. As Levtov put it during our interview, “If it’s good enough for the Pentagon, it’s good enough for you.”

There are still challenges ahead. Craft competes against established supply chain software vendors with entrenched enterprise customer bases, such as Oracle SCM Cloud, and established players like Resilinc that have recently added AI capabilities, as well as newer AI-native startups building similar intelligence capabilities. Continued success will depend on maintaining the quality of its proprietary data, expanding beyond government and defense, and proving its platform delivers better insights than any alternatives. 

Still, Craft has positioned itself at the intersection of AI, supply chain resilience, and national security. As organizations prioritize visibility into complex supplier networks, the company can become one of the defining infrastructure platforms powering global supply chain intelligence.