The second in a series of Silicon & Steel conversations, recorded at Reuters Events Supply Chain USA in Chicago.

Welcome back to Silicon & Steel conversations, where I sit down with the people building the physical backbone of the modern economy. Last time we stayed on the highway, with trucks. This time we follow the box itself, and everything that can quietly go wrong inside it.

My guest is Daniel Yun, co-founder and co-CEO of Willog, a Seoul-based supply chain company founded in 2021. Daniel is on his fourth startup; before Willog he ran a traditional fresh-food logistics business, with its own warehouse and trucks, and that is where he first ran into the problem Willog now exists to solve.

Let’s get into it.

A pallet of vaccines leaves a warehouse in one country and reaches a hospital in another a week later, having passed through a truck, a ship, and a plane. Somewhere along that journey the temperature slipped out of range, or the box took a hard fall. By the time the damage is noticed, no one can say where it happened, when, or who was responsible, because no one was watching. Multiply that across pharmaceuticals, fresh food, chemicals, and semiconductors, and you get what the industry politely calls a grey zone and what Daniel Yun calls a blind spot.

That is the gap Willog is built to close. The company, founded in Seoul in 2021, makes its own IoT sensors and pairs them with AI to monitor the condition of cargo, temperature, humidity, shock, tilt, and light, from the warehouse through truck, ocean, and air, turning events that used to vanish into a record you can act on. Willog describes the result as a five-stage framework: visibility, precise diagnosis and alerts, real-time action, data-driven improvement, and, at the top, AI risk prediction. Its pitch against the many “visibility” players is that most of them only track a shipment in transit, whereas Willog starts at the warehouse, where the risk often begins, and stitches every leg onto one data foundation.

By the company’s own figures, that approach has reached more than 200 enterprise customers, 7x year-over-year growth in new customers, and, strikingly, zero percent churn, all in under five years. Willog closed a Series B-2 round in May 2026 backed by seven investors, won a Presidential Award in Korea in 2025, and is now pushing into the United States, Singapore, and Japan. Daniel says the company is preparing for a Series C.

That is the what. The how, and the reasons behind it, are where it got interesting.

i) COVID cracked the market open

Willog’s timing looked almost comically bad, and then turned out to be perfect. Daniel had been building toward this since his fresh-food days, but when he launched, no one wanted it. What changed was a global emergency that made cold-chain proof a matter of life and death.

The first customer was a large Korean pharmaceutical company. Within a year of launching, Daniel says Willog had more than fifteen, and from that pharma beachhead it expanded into fresh food, chemicals, and, notably for this audience, display glass and semiconductors.

ii) Willog owns the whole stack

Most companies in this space pick a lane, hardware or software. Willog builds both, and manufactures its own devices, which is unusual and, Daniel argues, the point.

He frames it as a vertical pipeline, hardware, software, data, and, as we will get to, insurance, built as one system rather than assembled from parts. It is a deliberately harder path than a pure-software play, and the whole company is a bet that owning it end to end is what makes the data trustworthy.

iii. The surprise: they built their own insurance company

This was the part I did not see coming. Because Willog’s sensors can prove exactly what happened to a shipment, the company spun up a separate insurance business in Singapore and started writing parametric policies, coverage that pays out automatically when the data crosses a line, with no claims process to argue over.

The logic is neat: Willog’s customers already have to carry insurance on their cargo, so offering a cheaper, automatic version priced off their own sensor data is a natural attach, and it turns the data itself into a product.

iv. Daniel is careful about what Willog does not do

For a company talking up predictive AI, Daniel was refreshingly clear about the boundary. Willog does not plan routes, choose packaging, or manage carriers. It reads the conditions and tells you what happened, why, and what is likely to happen next. The decisions stay with the customer.

It is an honest line that quietly right-sizes the AI story: Willog is the instrument and the analyst, not the dispatcher.

v. Zero churn is engineered, not lucky

A zero percent churn rate is the kind of number that invites skepticism, so I asked what is really behind it. Daniel’s answer was less about the technology than the team around it.

He credited two other things: a customer-success team whose targets are tied to the customer’s own goals rather than Willog’s, and a product cadence fast enough to ship changes weekly. In a business where, as he put it, logistics changes every single minute, the company that changes with it is the one that keeps the account.

Step back, and Willog is an argument about where the value in supply chain data actually lives. For a decade the industry sold visibility, the dot on the map, the answer to “where is my shipment.” Willog’s bet is that visibility was only ever table stakes. The value, and the defensibility, are in accountability: not where the box is, but what happened to it, why, who is responsible, and who pays.

That reframing is what makes the insurance move more than a gimmick. Once you can prove a shipment’s condition beyond dispute, you can price the risk, automate the payout, and turn a cost center into a product. It is also why the vertical-integration bet, owning the hardware, the software, the data, and the policy, is coherent rather than sprawling: each layer exists to make the one above it trustworthy.

The risk is the mirror image of the bet. Owning hardware is capital-intensive and low-margin, and doing everything yourself is the hardest way to scale. Willog is wagering that in condition-sensitive logistics, where a single bad shipment can cost far more than the sensor that would have caught it, trust is worth more than asset-lightness. For anyone watching the physical economy, that is the tension to sit with: the glamorous layer is the software, but the value may sit in the unglamorous places nobody else wants to own

The number that stays with me is the zero, zero percent churn, in an industry famous for switching vendors over a rounding error. It is a small sign of something larger: once a shipper can finally see, and prove, what happens to its cargo, it does not want to go back to flying blind.

Willog may or may not become, in Daniel’s words, the standard for logistics. But the idea underneath it is hard to argue with. For decades the losses inside the box, the spoiled batch, the cracked panel, the silent delay, were treated as the unavoidable cost of moving things around the world. They were never unavoidable. They were just invisible.

I like to end these conversations the same way: by asking what the person would tell someone young enough to spend a whole career on the problem. So, I asked Daniel, a fourth-time founder who has spent years in the least glamorous corners of logistics, why a bright, ambitious person should choose supply chain to build in.

Which is as good a reason as any to keep watching this space, and this series.

Subscribe if Silicon & Steel is your kind of thing.
More conversations from the road are on the way, and my thanks to Daniel for being on this talk show.

Gaurav Singh Chaudhary
Silicon & Steel
Silicon & Steel, intelligence for chips, batteries & trade

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Condensed and lightly edited for clarity. English is not Daniel’s first language, so his answers have been cleaned for readability while keeping his meaning intact. The wording is being confirmed with him.

Q: Can you walk me through what Willog actually does, and how it started?

Daniel Yun: It starts with my own story. This is my fourth startup. Before Willog I ran a traditional logistics business, we had a warehouse and trucks, and we distributed fresh food. Doing that, I realized there were numerous blind spots in logistics. It still was not digitalized; companies handled everything by hand. Consumers and companies never really know where a product came from, or what happened to it, and they cannot prove or argue about it, because they have no data. That is why I started this business. I prepared from around 2019 while still running the previous company, and we decided to solve temperature first, because so many shipments lose temperature control and, since it is not digitalized, no one can prove it. I built the first prototype with my own money and brought it to investors in 2021.

Q: What happened when you launched?

Daniel Yun: My timing looked bad at first. Before COVID, nobody wanted our solution, because they did not want to open their data. Then COVID started, and pharmaceutical companies came to us first, to track the vaccines. Our first customer was a very big pharmaceutical company in Korea, and within one year of launching we had more than fifteen customers. From pharma we expanded into fresh food, chemicals, and then display glass and semiconductors.

Q: And you extended from the truck to the whole journey?

Daniel Yun: Yes. Our customers wanted to track from the warehouse, storage to storage, and then across ocean and air, so we expanded to cover every leg and integrated it all together. Air was really hard work, the data is different, a warehouse is not “active” the way transportation is, so we had to match and integrate everything. Once it is combined in one platform, we can analyze faster and more accurately, give the customer the right report, and build analysis tools and dashboards on top of that data.

Q: What does the platform actually tell a customer?

Daniel Yun: Three things. First, what happened, so the team can act right away and reduce product loss. Second, why it happened, we can combine the data and see who the driver was, what packaging was used, what size of truck, and so on. Third, using AI, what will happen, before, during, and after the shipment.

Q: You also built an insurance business. Tell me about that.

Daniel Yun: Because our data can prove what happened, we can prove it to insurance companies, so we released Willog Insurance in Singapore as a separate company. It is parametric insurance: if the customer sets two to eight degrees and the temperature goes to nine or ten, the insurance pays automatically and directly. All of our customers have to carry insurance anyway, on the warehouse, the transportation, ocean and air, so we provide it cheaper, easier, and automatically, and they manage it in our platform. Normally an insurer struggles because it does not know why a loss happened and cannot manage its loss rate; our data closes that gap.

Q: The condition-monitoring space is crowded, Sensitech, Roambee(Decklar), Controlant, Samsara, project44, FourKites. Where is your edge, and who are you displacing?

Daniel Yun: I don’t really think of them as our competitors. We might overlap in some areas, but our vision and way of working are different. Some companies focus only on hardware, and some only on software. We do both, and very few manufacture their own devices; we design and manufacture ours ourselves, and we focus on the data. We built the whole pipeline, hardware, software, data, and insurance, as one system. We are also very strong in Asia, with offices in Japan, Singapore, and Korea, and North America is a huge market for us to go after.

Q: Owning your own hardware is unusual. Is it a durable advantage?

Daniel Yun: A competitor’s device can also be used in our platform, so it is really about the data and the whole system, not just the sensor. On cost, recovery, and reuse at scale, we already have a team that manages all of that. At the beginning it was a big deal; now it is not.

Q: On predictive AI, how much is live today, and do you have enough data to make it reliable?

Daniel Yun: In supply chain, many things change all the time. We integrate with the customer’s ERP, and changes there flow into our system. But I want to be clear: we do not do the route, we do not do the packaging, and we do not manage the carriers. Those are the customer’s side. They digitalize and share that data, and we work from it to figure out what happened, why it happened, and what will happen. We can advise, because we have a lot of reference data, but the final decision is always the customer’s.

Q: You mentioned zero percent churn and 7x growth. What is driving the zero churn?

Daniel Yun: We analyzed why our customers stay for four or five years. First, domain knowledge: AI has changed SaaS, but whoever has the real domain knowledge and know-how cannot be replaced, and we know our customers very well, so we can fit the product to each of them. Second, our customer-success team’s targets are tied to the customer’s own goals, not ours, and they respond in a day or two. Third, we improve the product very fast, we release many things every week and every month, based on customer feedback. Logistics changes every single minute, so we have to change every single minute too. I think that is the only way to survive in this field.