Oritain raises $57m for business expansion

Traceability and provenance specialist Oritain has said it will expand into new geographies and product categories with the help of a $57 million fundraising round.

The Dunedin, New Zealand-headquartered company’s technology is used to trace the origins of a wide range of products including cotton, meat, honey, milk and coffee, working with major brand owners including Nescafe, Chanel, Primark and Lacoste to verify their supply chain, prevent fraud and counterfeiting, and protect their products in international markets.

The round, led by Highland Europe, will enable the company to accelerate its go-to-market plans for current and new products, according to a statement.

Using Oritain’s approach, samples of genuine product are obtained and analysed in the lab in order to identify a “fingerprint” for each product – based on levels of chemicals and isotopes absorbed by the animal or plant source from the environment – that can be used to identify the country, region, and even farm of origin on audit.

These geochemical fingerprints are fed into industry-leading data banks of products monitoring complex global supply chains such as palm oil, coffee, cocoa, cotton, vanilla, and soy and used as benchmarks to audit products at any point in the supply chain.

In some cases, the fingerprints are given a digital dimension by being linked to on-pack codes, for example in Oritain’s recent partnership with New Zealand wine producer Pyramid Valley.

“Oritain’s forensic science can take a commodity sample and tell you precisely where in the world it comes from,” said Highland Europe’s Jacob Bernstein, who is joining the board at Oritain.

“Does this cocoa come from a deforested national park? Is this cotton from where my supplier says it is? Is this coffee truly Brazilian, as the label says? This groundbreaking technology is a dream solution for sourcing and sustainability leaders at the world’s largest brands who can finally get to grips with the authenticity of their supply chains.”