Acquisition adds blockchain-based product identity lifecycle management, improving global supply chain collaboration on decentralized networks
Phoenix, Arizona — October 10, 2017 — Sweetbridge Inc., the blockchain alliance for a liquid supply chain, has today announced that it has acquired Aperio LLC, a blockchain platform for supply chain solutions. Sweetbridge will fully absorb the Aperio brand in the acquisition. The purchase will provide the Sweetbridge platform with simplified data management capabilities, increased transparency and visibility of supply chain operations, automated workflows, and enhanced product identity lifecycle management (PILM) and tracking.
Aperio’s offices, which are located at the Skysong Facility in Scottsdale, Arizona, will remain open and managed by former Aperio employees, who have now become employees of Sweetbridge, effective immediately. The acquisition marks Aperio’s first exit; the platform had been funded and operated by Aperio Co-Founders Todd Taylor and Ken Staker until the point of the acquisition. The transaction is expected to formally close this month.
Sweetbridge CEO and Chairman Scott Nelson said: “The combination of Aperio’s stellar product data management capacity with the liquidity and trade currency capabilities offered by the Sweetbridge platform will allow us to take a critical leap forward toward global supply chains using blockchain for shared success. Sweetbridge and Aperio share the vision of tapping into blockchain to address some of the key inefficiencies of supply chain to achieve better utilization and outcomes. We are confident that the addition of Aperio to the Sweetbridge ecosystem will enhance trust, collaboration, and visibility among the many businesses involved in supply chain design and operations worldwide.”
Aperio’s blockchain-based core sourcing platform provides Sweetbridge with a medium to virtually represent and identify products as they are sourced, built and passed through supply chain networks. These virtualized assets contain the product specifications, customer information, bill of materials, and all other necessary data needed for players to create a product and send it to the end user. The platform leverages blockchain to eliminate the need to manage multiple catalogues for customers or marketplaces. As a shared, distributed ledger of assets within the supply chain, it also increases visibility and trust among trading partners.
The Aperio platform will benefit from the liquidity capacity of Sweetbridge tokens to ease onboarding of customers with zero-interest loans against assets, as well as its capacity to significantly quicken settlement and payment times. Using Sweetbridge tokens, suppliers who typically waited 90 to 180 days from the time an order was placed to receive payment can instead self-finance more working capital at drastically lower cost by borrowing tokens through the collateralization of assets such as cryptocurrencies, invoices, inventory, equipment, and more.
Aperio CEO and Co-Founder Todd Taylor said: “We are proud to become part of the Sweetbridge ecosystem, and believe that our relationship will enable business networks to connect, collaborate, and automate in unprecedented ways. The cooperation between our organizations will facilitate the creation of dramatically simplified supply chain networks with enhanced liquidity, rapid settlement, effortless member onboarding, and a frictionless flow of information, material, and capital.”
The addition of Aperio’s technology will allow Sweetbridge to accelerate multiple product and supplier workflows through chaincode, or smart contracts that automate the process flow of supply chains. In combination with the enhanced transparency and visibility that the platform provides to suppliers, Aperio will play a significant role in increasing participation incentives for those who typically take out loans or tie up valuable working capital to finance their operations.
Nelson said: “Through this acquisition, Sweetbridge positions itself one step closer to achieving its mission of creating more liquid and sustainable global supply chains. The Aperio platform that Todd and Ken have built will propel forward our groundbreaking effort to refine the world’s economic models. We are extremely excited by the common mission we share of using blockchain to find a better way forward for global commerce.”
About Sweetbridge
Sweetbridge sponsors the development of blockchain-based economic protocols and applications to transform high-friction global supply chains into Liquid Value Networks. The Swiss-based non-profit foundation is gathering interested industry technologists, blockchain projects and open-source contributors from around the world to form a blockchain alliance. The shared goal is to transform brittle, industrial-era commerce through decentralized industry ecosystems that create a faster, fairer value exchange, unleash working capital, better utilize resources and optimize talent for the benefit of all participants. To learn more, visit Sweetbridge.com or follow @sweetbridgeinc on Twitter.
About Aperio
Aperio was created with the idea of reducing the complexity of supply chain networks and automating transaction flow. By working to help manage complex supplier relationships and product information challenges with some of the world’s largest technology companies, the team developed a simplified economic model where virtualized products become the primary blockchain assets, and updates are recorded as transactions on a shared, distributed ledger. To learn more, visit Aperio.cloud.
