An atom by itself isn't terribly remarkable. But as atoms bond, they become something more than the sum of their parts. Our frontline industries used to be something similar, but years of disinvestment and globalization have led to high worker turnover, stagnated productivity, analog records... no cohesion. From our food to our factories, the cornerstones of our economy are relegated to obsolete tools.
On the bright side, we are seeing advancements in automation and analytics, but as more technology is rolled out, incoherence is multiplied. The next leap in frontline innovation is not going to be found in a point solution: it’s in unlocking your own team. The bottleneck today is not a lack of data... it's that the data are not actionable: clipboards, spreadsheets, and whiteboards. By the time your team gets the intel they need, the problem (and its solution) is long gone.
That’s where we come in. Tendrel isn't simply an app (or a suite of apps for that matter). There are dozens, probably hundreds of tools, that do labor management or facility checklists or asset monitoring. But these siloed solutions, and the data they produce, don't communicate with one another. And so, they exist in a vacuum, like a lonely atom floating through space.
Tendrel is the connective force that binds these fragments: a data layer to tie together people, process, and product. In complex systems, like logistics or manufacturing, many components interact in non-linear ways. Emergent properties, which are not present in the individual components, arise from their interactions. Our mission is to harness the potential of frontline teams through these interactions.
In coming posts, you'll hear from the rest of our team... some of the best and brightest in the field, a motley crew who's spent time across farms & warehouses, Amazon & Netflix. You'll get views into our tech architecture and product roadmap and engineering philosophy. If you want to come along for the ride, you can sign up here.
Coming fresh out of a stint in agriculture, I'd spent plenty of time among plants and was inspired by the notion of a subtle, nearly invisible thread supporting a structure much larger than itself. But a bit more philosophically, “tendrel” is a Buddhist concept: ten means “to depend” and drel is translated as “connection”... said another way, nothing exists in isolation; everything is interconnected and interdependent. We felt the same way.
Until the next one,
Akash, CEO & Founder