Launching the Chorus Line
Chorus is spinning out of X to become an independent company focused on transforming the way the world makes, moves and manages goods.
Today we’re announcing that the Chorus team has graduated from The Moonshot Factory to become an independent company. Series X Capital led Chorus’ funding, as the team scales its suite of AI driven orchestration tools to radically transform how we make, move, and manage the world’s goods.
Trillions of dollars worth of goods move throughout global supply chains each year. Yet every year hundreds of millions worth of cargo goes missing. Visibility into critical information, like the precise location and condition of goods like medicine, high value assets, or food, is the missing link we need to reduce or even prevent these losses.
Chorus is on a mission to fill in these gaps, so businesses have a constant, real-time view into what’s happening with their goods—whether it’s understanding the up-to-the-minute status and location of X-ray machines inside a hospital in order to treat patients more quickly, giving healthcare workers the ability to monitor the shipment temperature of medications, knowing the exact time a crate of bumpers will arrive at a manufacturing plant so the automaker can accurately schedule labor and production schedules, or even sending factory managers a possible theft alert if expensive equipment suddenly goes out a side door. Knowing where things are and what condition they’re in matters.
Chorus team members working at X
The Origins of Chorus: Project Delta
Chorus takes its roots from an earlier X moonshot that focused on a very specific set of goods to be moved and used: food. At the time, 820 million people around the world couldn’t access the food they needed, yet one third of the world’s food was wasted. In the United States, the USDA estimated that 30 to 40 percent of the food supply was going uneaten.
A small team called Project Delta set out to create a smarter food system-one that knows where food is, what condition it’s in, and where it should go to prevent waste and reach those in need.
Together with industry partners like Kroger and Feeding America, the Delta team explored a range of technologies designed to tackle food waste and ultimately designed an “air-traffic-control system” for food. As Project Delta lead Emily Ma recounts in this week’s Moonshot Podcast, the Delta team built a system that could capture, share, and connect supply-and-demand signals for food from grocers, food service providers, logistics companies, and food banks so they could match supply with demand.
After some of the team and technologies moved to Google to address food waste and insecurity on a larger scale, the remaining team continued building at X. This team, Project Chorus, focused on developing their early sensor technology and built on what they’d learned about efficient distribution and how to bring real-time visibility to goods moving through supply chain systems.
The Delta Team in a Google kitchen lab, marking the early beginnings of Project Chorus
The Chorus Platform
Available now, the Chorus platform is a suite of AI-driven orchestration tools that brings together four elements: sensors for tagging goods, existing hardware like third-party computers and routers which can be used as readers for monitoring goods, AI-powered analysis to derive insights from this data, and a customer dashboards to see everything at a glance in real time.
Here’s how it works:
-
Attach a Chorus sensor to any asset you want to manage. These sensors are available in three different form factors: the Seeker, the Explorer, and the Scout. The Seeker is a printable sticker which operates as an active, real-time sensor and is designed for use at an item level. The Explorer is a reusable sensor the size of a key ring that is designed for larger assets with a long life and is safe to be used with perishables. The Scout operates as both a sensor and a reader to monitor the location and condition of goods, using worldwide network connections.
-
Reader devices collect the sensor data and deliver visibility into the item’s location and condition at any point across the supply chain, including indoors. Chorus has partnered with leading wireless and cellular providers to build their Chorus Reader Network on existing Internet infrastructure, so these readers don’t require any additional hardware.
-
The AI-driven Chorus Cloud system instantly ingests and processes data from the readers to identify and send alerts about issues like route deviations, security threats, or stock outages.
-
The Summit Dashboard provides a set of tools and visualization for customers to manage their Chorus-enabled assets and proactively intervene in the case of adverse events. For example, the dashboard makes it simple to follow an item’s journey from the distribution center to delivery location, and then manage it once it arrives in the stockroom. The dashboard documents each step, and immediately identifies issues that could lead to changes, delays, or other problems like temperature control.
Learning from our Global Partners
The Project Chorus team developed and refined their system through a series of early pilot programs over the past three years, including their partnership with New Zealand’s Healthcare Logistics. During the pandemic, the team worked closely with HCL to safely distribute 11 million COVID-19 vaccinations, enough for two shots for every single person in the country.
The Chorus team is currently working with customers across 14 countries. This fall, one of the world’s largest logistics companies, Kuehne+Nagel, announced that it had adopted the Chorus platform to give its global customers unprecedented insights about their goods. Chorus powers Kuehne+Nagel’s Max Visibility service, which gives customers like French sporting goods leader Lepape detailed information about shipments from the factory to their retail locations across Paris. Lepape uses the system to monitor their full inventory, getting real-time alerts for every shipment of mountain bikes, running shipments or ski masks, so they can ensure their stores remain well stocked.
Congrats to the entire Chorus team on today’s milestone, and thank you to the many partners and individuals around the world who helped the team develop this system, test early prototypes, and provide feedback on what worked best for them.