Mapping a More Resilient World

Tara Gupta's path to climate work ran through a tropical valley in Panama before it ran through a boardroom. 

In 2017, while studying at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), she spent time at Kalu Yala, a sustainable community built into 575 acres of Panamanian rainforest, learning permaculture and watching firsthand how soil, water, and food systems hold a community together, or don't. That same instinct ran through her art: her BFA was in Open Media and Sustainability, and her environmental short film "Lucy," selected from nearly 200 entries for the One Earth Young Filmmakers Contest, later won a prize named for a "Planet Warrior." Science gave her the diagnosis. Art gave her a language for making people feel it.

That instinct became Map Collective. Tara founded the company in January 2020, setting out to build the first visual dashboard for corporations to manage their supply chains against the realities of climate, nature, and resource availability, asking, in effect, why an industry that could track a shipment to the hour had no equivalent way of tracking its carbon, water, or deforestation footprint. Early clients like Maui County and Curaleaf tested the idea, and a National Science Foundation SBIR grant funded a blockchain system for tracking greenhouse gas emissions against planetary boundary tipping points.

The deeper the team got, the clearer the core obstacle became: there simply wasn't enough reliable data upstream in most supply chains to know what was actually happening.

Map Collective's answer was a proprietary AI model that fills roughly 60% of that gap directly from bill-of-lading data, turning shipping records into a real map of who actually supplies whom.

Once that map existed, an obvious question followed: what happens to it when the world gets violent?

Tara found a natural partner in Anadyr Horizon, the AI venture built to simulate how wars start and spread, and the two companies began applying Map Collective's supply chain data to Anadyr's conflict modeling, stress-testing where a company's suppliers, ports, and shipping lanes would break first if a regional conflict escalated, and building plans to reroute around the breakage in advance rather than after.

That work briefly seemed like a hedge against a hypothetical. Then, in early 2026, war between the US, Israel, and Iran shut down the Strait of Hormuz, a chokepoint for roughly a fifth of the world's oil and gas, exactly the kind of cascading supply shock the joint modeling had mapped out. Companies and governments that had treated the work as scenario planning suddenly needed it as operating reality, and Map Collective's phone started ringing with requests to help build supply chains resilient enough to survive the next one.

The market underneath all of this has stopped being optional.

Scope 3 emissions, the indirect, supply-chain-driven category, typically make up 70 to 90 percent of a company's total carbon footprint, and regulators have moved decisively from asking companies to disclose them to requiring it: the EU's Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive, even after recent narrowing, still forces large companies to report it, with California and a growing list of jurisdictions worldwide moving in step.

Layer geopolitics on top, and the picture gets bigger still. Analysts now treat supply chain risk software as a multi-billion-dollar category growing at a double-digit clip every year, and several now break out "geopolitical and environmental risk" as its own line item within it, distinct from the cybersecurity and compliance risk that used to dominate the category, a sign of where buyers are actually spending.

Few companies sit at the intersection of both forces, mandatory climate disclosure and an increasingly violent world, the way Map Collective does, and fewer still arrive there with Tara’s instinct for making an invisible problem visible. With Fortune 500 deployments already underway and B Ventures backing the next stage of growth, the addressable market in front of her isn't a projection. It's a queue, made of companies that didn't know they needed this kind of map until the Strait of Hormuz reminded them, and won't be able to stop needing it now that they know.