We are all privy to the problems of the systems. Seldom do we take charge to uproot those problems and establish a cleaner system for a sustainable tomorrow. Well, Gunilla is clearly not someone who’d sit back and let things fall in place with impurities. No wonder why this confident and courageous woman did and does what she does!
Gunilla F. Grimsgaard, the CEO of Orixe AS (formerly known as Secure Supply Chain AS), is a professional with more than 25 years of experience in software innovations and cybersecurity. She has been holding key positions in the development of BankID, mobile banking, and strategic projects within data security and management.
Seven years ago, she decided that she would put all her efforts into something that would contribute to building the society she wants to live in in the future. “When a friend of mine presented a problem with counterfeit parts in long complex value chains, I knew that I could fix it with IT and blockchain, and when I got to learn about the misfortunes that were hidden in dark supply chains – modern slavery, corruption and excessive pollution – I know that this is my mission and then Orixe was born,” Gunilla shares.
She grew up in a small town in Sweden where the population was not more than thirty thousand at that time. She was a kid with interest in active sports and she really enjoyed playing. She pursued her M. Sc. in Economics and continued to work for several conglomerates including Capgemini and Accenture. Her senior management roles were succeeded by CXO roles in Information Security, evidently reflecting her immense potential and growing career trajectory.
Her passion for the domain was so much so that she waited more than 25 years for Artificial Intelligence to boom. She founded Orixe to make an impact! Orixe AS was born in 2018. “The idea came as a response to an incident at the start of 2018 where a Norwegian company found out that a supplier of electronic parts they had been employing for several years had delivered parts with a fake certificate of origins,” Gunilla says. “The costs of righting the problem for both the company and the clients they were reselling to became so large the CEO decided something had to be done. After some consulting about possibilities for a system for control and regulation of products in the supply chain I decided to found Orixe to assess the challenges that modern supply chains face.”
What’s so amusing about Gunilla is that instead of caving to the circumstances, Gunialla looked at the endeavour as an opportunity to create something sustainable. It is solely her caliber and courage that led to her founding Orixe AS. Gunilla says, “By taking ethical and environmental responsibility in supply chain management – You can make a change!”
Orixe is a company devoted to creating trust between suppliers and buyers. They seek to help create better and safer supply chains for companies and organisations operating in international value chains. By providing traceability, and ensuring the authenticity of products and integrity of certificates, they’ve created a system that is easy, efficient, and economically attractive, which will help shape a new industry standard within quality assurance and supply chain management.
“Many of the problems we are facing globally today originate from poor supply chain management, as dark supply chains hide modern slavery, pollution, corruption, unsafe production and products not meeting safety standards,” Gunilla reveals. “Orixe was created to give businesses the strength to act responsibly, and give purchasers the opportunity to demand traceability within the supply chain,” she shares. They only operate in the B2B market, but they’ve often met with positive responses from people when they learn about the problems they resolve.
As a young woman, she faced quite a lot of that glass roof situation with unfriendly men in power, however, today, her solutions speak for themselves. Gunilla strongly believes that everybody can make an important contribution to the collective goal of creating a sustainable future. “What you do matters! What we all do matters and we need to support each other. Start today!”