Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Launch HN: CommodityAI (YC W24) – Shipment management for commodity traders

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 48 posts

Re: Launch HN: CommodityAI (YC W24) – Shipment management for commodity traders

#23

Post by 9dev »

Ah, that’s interesting. My company, Matchory, focuses on market research and supplier discovery by analyzing bills of lading and crawled web content, then building a huge database from that. By now, we have a few hundred million BOLs and roughly 14 million companies in store. If you’re interested in having a talk about any kind of collaboration, contact me. Email in bio.

Re: Launch HN: CommodityAI (YC W24) – Shipment management for commodity traders

#24

Post by thinking_banana »

I'm not super familiar with the overall-commodity trading platform. But one of the more empowering businesses in the grains business has been "Bushel" - https://bushelpowered.com Is it possible to have a trading platform focused on "grains business" only ? Or does that deviate from your core value proposition?

Re: Launch HN: CommodityAI (YC W24) – Shipment management for commodity traders

#26

Post by c_o_n_v_e_x »

alexpetralia wrote: post #16

My opinion is that this is not really a tech problem, this is a business problem. Will the traders at Cargill, Vitol, Exxon, Trafigura, Glencore buy it? Do they want to take the time to "learn" another tool? Does it "just work", without any "let me get back to my product people"? Also, of course, every commodity market is completely different and has a whole web of intricate details in logistics, regulation, product,…

>Will the traders at Cargill, Vitol, Exxon, Trafigura, Glencore buy it? Do they want to take the time to "learn" another tool?

Traders like money. Anything that would enable them to keep more of what they "kill" at bonus time would be popular.

Re: Launch HN: CommodityAI (YC W24) – Shipment management for commodity traders

#27

Post by singhrac »

KyleManuel wrote: post #9
danielmarkbruce wrote: post #5

What commodities are you focused on? Like, softs, energy, metals etc

Our first few customers are agriculture based. Sugar, Coffee, Cocoa and more things like this that have similar distribution supply chains. We believe we have the tools and expertise to expand to energy and metal in the future. They are much different, but we believe with the tools we have developed, they can be repurposed quickly to support a wide range of commodities.

I used to trade those products, but futures only. It sounds like this is software for physical traders, so I can't offer much in the way of feedback, but wish you luck. A question based on my past experience: are you required to report transactions on your platform, and if not, would you publish some aggregated data anyway?

Just curious because I always heard physical volume was always several orders of magnitude smaller than futures (for good reasons!) and was curious in which commodities that was most true.

Re: Launch HN: CommodityAI (YC W24) – Shipment management for commodity traders

#28

Post by simonCGN »

KyleManuel wrote: post #19
btown wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From what I'm reading above, the pitch is more "I can keep using my existing systems, but use this tool as a layer on top to help me with my data entry and anomaly detection, and our clients/external parties don't need to know that we have these superpowers." It's a great way to break into a market, but there's also less lock-in and forced virality relative to a system that you encourage suppliers/partners/counterpar…

Yes this is our approach. We noticed that all our customers spend a significant amount of resources getting their tech infrastructure configured. We want to "supercharge" their existing solutions, not rip and replace.

So it is not a fully fledged TMS such as Cargowise from Wisetech, correct?
Post reply on HN