We didn't read about the problem. We lived it.

Gunther had spent two decades on the ground — auditing sawmills in Indonesia, advising the European Commission on forest policy, helping 300+ companies navigate FSC certification. He knew timber supply chains from the inside. And he kept seeing the same scene repeat itself: a well-meaning operations manager, a spreadsheet held together with hope, and a compliance deadline two weeks away.

The documents existed. Somewhere. In email threads, shared drives, supplier portals that nobody had logged into since 2021. Every new regulation — EUTR, then EUDR, then customer codes of conduct — meant starting the collection process from scratch. The data was never the problem. The structure was.

Thomas had seen the same thing from the other side. At GlobalFoundries in Dresden, he'd spent years building compliance systems for chemical incident tracking across a semiconductor fab — systems where missing supplier data wasn't an audit finding, it was a safety risk. The engineering was solvable. Getting reliable, structured data from contractors on time, every time, was the hard part.

They met. They compared notes. It was the same problem.

They founded supplycanvas in Berlin in 2023, and refirmed it in Leipzig in 2025 — building the tool neither of them had when they needed it: a workspace where supplier data is collected once, structured properly, and reused for every regulation, customer request and audit that follows. No enterprise overhead. No year-long consulting project. Just clarity.