The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Science and Technology Directorate (S&T) announced that mesur.io from North Carolina, Neoflow from Toronto, and Transmute from Austin successfully completed real-time, standards-based testing for exchanging supply chain data with U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP). The companies demonstrated their technology readiness, enabling CBP to integrate data from the startups and their customers with existing data in the CBP Automated Commercial Environment, enhancing the security and facilitation of international trade.
All three startups were awarded under S&T Silicon Valley Innovation Program’s (SVIP) “Preventing Forgery & Counterfeiting of Certificates and Licenses” topic call. This initiative sought technologies that implement World-Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Verifiable Credential Data Model (VCDM), Linked Data (JSON-LD) and W3C Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) standards. These technologies enhance global interoperability, traceability, security and automation of cross-border supply chain information.
“This real-time testing with CBP demonstrated the maturity of the standards, the commercial readiness of the startup’s technology platforms and their ability to support CBP’s trade modernization efforts,” said Melissa Oh, SVIP Managing Director.
Over the last three years, the three startups, in collaboration with CBP and SVIP, jointly worked to help develop and implement the global standards noted above. They also contributed to the creation and definition of traceability vocabularies in the W3C Credential Community Group (CCG) and have established open, royalty-free, and free-to-use application programming interfaces (APIs) that facilitate genuine multi-vendor, multi-platform global interoperability.
Each startup focused on domains where its unique expertise lies. mesur.io concentrated on agriculture and food safety; Neoflow specialized in oil and natural gas; and Transmute targeted steel and e-commerce, demonstrating the applicability of the standards and technologies to the broad and diverse supply chain ecosystem.
