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 — one of Europe’s largest semiconductor fabs — his team built a documentation system with a simple principle: routine work should produce compliant records as a byproduct, not as extra work. What started on spreadsheets and printed forms grew into a platform that still runs today, twenty years and a few technology generations later — from Windows CE and SQL to Android and graph databases. The engineering was solvable. Getting people to document what they do, correctly and consistently, without slowing them down — that was the hard part.

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

They founded supplycanvas in Berlin in 2023, and reincorporated 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.