Axios Events Host and Moderator Hope King interviewed Exiger CEO Brandon Daniels as part of the Axios x Exiger event Building the Future: AI, Trade, and the New Rules of Power. The discussion below has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Why Supply Chain Visibility is Critical
Hope King, Axios Events Host & Moderator
I do want to start big picture because Exiger’s AI is built to provide transparency into supply chains. So why is this kind of visibility so critical at this moment?
Brandon Daniels, Exiger CEO
The world is outsourced. We hear from our clients that 90% of the cost of manufacturing the products that they deliver to their customers is the goods that they purchase from third party companies, from their supply chains. We’re completely fragile to the supply chains that support us. And that has been increasing since the eighties. The entire world is verticalized—you’ve had increasing specialization across all industry sectors. It doesn’t matter if we’re talking about servers or weapons systems or pharmaceuticals.
There are companies that just manufacture these specific active pharmaceutical ingredients (API) or chemical or excipient that goes into upstream drugs. And that hyper specialization, it’s led to globalization as well. And just in time delivery has afforded that globalization. When you think about what has happened, the world has diversified, it’s expanded. And most companies, their entire operation is a group of hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of companies that are downstream from them. So that kind of exponential scale creates a need for people to get visibility into it. And most people don’t. 67% of CEOs can’t see past even their tier ones. So there are a lot of issues in terms of supply chain visibility.
The second problem is there’s pervasive risk. At the end of 2024, every single day it felt like there was a new supply chain issue. There were multiple hurricanes. If everybody remembers Hurricane Helene…in Europe, there were torrential rains. They were the equivalent of hurricanes in the Mediterranean. You also had China impose export controls on germanium, gallium, and antimony to the United States—critical minerals for all advanced technology. And I’m not just talking defense, I’m talking satellites, I’m talking advanced computing, critical components for our quantum computing future. And so you have multiple risks that were all happening at once. If you remember, there were pervasive labor strikes and labor strikes that hit the ports. So it felt like every day, we were updating our clients on something new. How are they ever supposed to prioritize when they have hundreds of thousands of suppliers meeting a pervasive explosion of risk?
What you need are systems that can first help you to map those multi-tiered supply chains and the most advanced artificial intelligence—we’re the largest company in the world doing this. You need to be able to map those supply chains. You need to be able to monitor and manage that risk, assess the severity, impact and priority of that risk so that you can start to get this in some semblance of order. It’s the same problems that we had as cyber grew 10 years ago.
Hope King, Axios Events Host & Moderator
When you have that in real time, you can make more proactive decisions that can be more effective.
Brandon Daniels, Exiger CEO
You’re absolutely right. Think about it as a central nervous system. So when we build out these supply chains and we have the ability to do anything from take a manufacturer part number and turn it into all of its constituent parts, show you where all the fabs are, show you where all the assemblies are, or break down a pharmaceutical component, an individual antibiotic, and show you all of the places, parts, components, and suppliers that are responsible for manufacturing that product.
When we geolocate all of that, we can now monitor it like the central nervous system. We can tell you when there’s a paper cut, ignore it, or we can tell you when you just got shot directly to the center mass and we should figure something out. And that’s what’s happening with the weaponization of the periodic table with China right now. Where we are with critical minerals, it’s a shot to the center mass, and we must figure it out.
The Need for Continuous Supply Chain Innovation
Hope King, Axios Events Host & Moderator
And you can really in advance tell your clients and they can take those proactive actions. Let’s move away from supply chain risk to the innovation you say is happening deep in the supply chain. Can you unpack that a little bit?
Brandon Daniels, Exiger CEO
How does the west win? How do ideas win? How do global democracies win? Those are the things that I’ve been thinking most about when it comes to supply chain technology. And the only thing I can think of is scaling disruption. It’s actually turning innovation into a continuous part of the supply chain because there has been a mediocrity in institutional scale China. They have these completely verticalized supply chains where literally there’s a mill next to a forging facility, next to a components facility, next to an auto manufacturer—completely streamlined, completely effective.
The only way to make that obsolete is for us to continually innovate at every level. So germanium gets banned by China. Did you know that we can produce the entire semiconductor-ready germanium supply needs of the United States using coal ash leaching and zinc smelting residues already here in the United States? The Department of Energy is leading pilots right now to basically convert and recycle those materials into things that could replace our entire germanium need. It would exceed our germanium need that we just had in 2024. When we’re talking about innovation at the supply base, it starts at the raw materials and then it goes up. There’s a company called Divergent that a lot of people are really excited about. I’m excited because their software is defining the casting and forging process right now. There are casting and forging facilities across the United States, across the world, that are these central nodes critical to all of our supply chains.
Most people think supply chains are big triangles. They’re actually pyramids and diamonds. There are three providers that can do magnesium casting in the United States and if anything happens to them, it’s a big problem. For instance, we’ve had three of those diamond points either have fires or had to idle their production because of financial issues. In just the last three months alone, all their capabilities are gone. And so being able to print these components, these alloys that can replace all those casting and forging facilities with new modernized facilities, it can generate a much more rapid, innovative supply chain. Think about the entire supply chain like a bunch of APIs feeding off one another.
The final element is that labor arbitrage as the major driver of cost differentiation in supply chains is gone. In north Texas, some places are deregulated enough that you can build factories in under two years that are cheaper than places in China. Printing robotics is a global market, and places in Vietnam and China can’t compete on a differentiated margin basis. Even a small tariff between the United States and one of these other countries can lead to the investment coming in and helping us to build these capital capabilities. It costs us between $100 million to $300 million of CapEx to build a new casting forging facility. It costs us $50 million in CapEx from deployment to part in utilizing a divergent robotic capability.
The Mission: End Modern Slavery, Empower the Warfighter
Hope King, Axios Events Host & Moderator
I want to switch gears lastly to the mission of Exiger, which is to make the world a safe and transparent place to succeed. How does that work in AI-driven supply chain management actually contribute to the mission that you have?
Brandon Daniels, Exiger CEO
There are three things. One, our artificial intelligence helps to get people out of modern slavery. It helps to find where classified information is getting in the hands of the enemy. It helps to find situations where we can improve the cost and accelerate the process of getting parts to the war fighter. We’re living our mission by actually doing good, and we’ve scaled 80% year on year for the last six years. We’re also doing it and doing well. But the thing is, beyond that part of the mission, we then think, okay, how can we contribute to the base? So we deliver our technology to several NGOs at no cost, including Human Trafficking Institute, Hope for Justice / Slave-Free Alliance, and Transparency International.
For instance, Hope for Justice / Slave-Free Alliance has utilized our technology to save over 400 people out of slavery. We have covered walls with these broken locks that represent people we’ve freed from modern slavery. The final thing is we invest in the things that we believe in: decimating modern slavery and supporting the war fighters. These are the service members that are our customers and the people that we get up and come to work for every day. So we work with NGOs like Candorful and With Honor.
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