Prewave

The Suez Canal blockage in 2021 reminded the entire world just how fragile global supply chains are. A single unexpected event — a grounded ship, a closed port, a strike, a flood — can halt production at companies thousands of miles away. Lisa Smith and Harald Nitschinger founded Prewave in Vienna from this awareness: companies need systems that see risks coming before they become crises. Prewave has built an AI platform that monitors open information sources in real time — news, social media, government reports, shipment tracking data — to identify early warning signals of supply chain risk. The goal is not to react to incidents after they occur, but to anticipate them with enough lead time to reroute orders, activate alternative suppliers, or build safety stock. The platform covers multiple risk dimensions: logistics disruptions, geopolitical instability, supplier financial risks, ESG violations, and extreme weather events. Every supplier in the chain is monitored and receives a dynamically updated risk score; visibility extends beyond the direct supplier to the second and third tiers of the chain — the so-called tier-n suppliers, which are often the true points of vulnerability. The model is B2B enterprise SaaS. Customers are large manufacturing companies, retailers, and logistics operators with complex supply chains and growing compliance obligations — in Europe, the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive makes ESG supply chain traceability no longer optional. Prewave embodies a paradigm shift in industrial risk management: from reaction to prevention, from periodic audit to continuous monitoring. In an era of increasingly global and increasingly exposed supply chains, this kind of operational intelligence has become a strategic investment rather than a cost.