Yessica Klein
8 min read
09 November 2025
After studying abroad in Germany and the Netherlands, Lisa Smith returned home to Vienna to pursue a PhD focused on sustainability in global supply chains. Her research took a sharp turn in 2013 when the Rana Plaza factory collapse in Bangladesh exposed just how little companies knew about the risks hidden deep in their supply networks. Lisa spent the next five years developing technology that could identify those early signals across languages and borders. That work became the foundation for Prewave, the company she cofounded to help businesses anticipate and address disruption and sustainability risks in their supply chains.
How did your academic work evolve into a company?
I started researching supply chain sustainability during my master’s and continued through my PhD. I was trying to answer a basic question: how can we measure a company’s sustainability performance more accurately, especially across complex supply chains? Then in 2013, the Rana Plaza factory collapsed in Bangladesh, killing over a thousand workers. As I looked into it, I realized that warning signs had been reported locally. There were protests, visible cracks in the walls, but these signals weren’t picked up because they appeared in Bengali, in local news and social media. I became obsessed with the idea that this kind of risk data was out there but being missed. That’s what led to the core technology behind Prewave: an AI system that scans global sources in more than 400 languages to detect supply chain risks in real time.
What helped you survive those early years before you had customers?
We were lucky to be in Austria, where there’s strong support for research-based innovation. We received several non-dilutive public grants, targeted programs designed to help academic projects reach the market. Those were combined with early-stage VC investment from local funds like Speedinvest, xista and AWS Gründungsfonds. That mix allowed us to keep building while we worked toward product–market fit. But I won’t pretend it was easy. It took time to find the right angle and get companies to see that this was a sustainability issue as well as a risk management issue.
How did the landscape change after 2020?
Before the pandemic, supply chains were mostly invisible to the public. Then COVID hit, and everyone, from executives to everyday consumers, realized how fragile they really were. Around that time, our work started shifting more explicitly toward supply chain resilience. We’d always focused on disruptions, but the urgency increased, and decision-makers started paying attention. Then in 2022, Germany passed the Supply Chain Act, which required large companies to actively monitor and address risks in their supply chains. That was a turning point. It aligned perfectly with what we were already doing and accelerated our growth in the DACH region.
“We want to become the global platform for supply chain risk, but with everything changing geopolitically, we also need to stay adaptable. Growth is important, but so is doing it in a smart, strategic way.”
What did your research background prepare you for?
Doing a PhD teaches you to be a pioneer. No one hands you a roadmap. You have to define your problem, find your path and push a niche area of knowledge forward. That’s very similar to early-stage entrepreneurship. But running a company also means managing managers, people who may have decades more experience than you. That was entirely new for me. So were things like hiring across borders, negotiating large enterprise deals and closing major funding rounds. Each stage brought a different set of challenges I hadn’t seen before.
How did you navigate those gaps in experience?
We leaned a lot on our investors. Their teams had specialists who’d helped other companies hire senior leadership or navigate legal hurdles. Some of those advisors were hands-on with us week by week. Other times, we just figured things out as we went. I often compare it to parenting: you don’t need to know how to raise a teenager on day one; you just need to grow alongside your company and stay one step ahead. Over time, your own team becomes a resource too, more and more people join with experience from other scaleups, and that internal knowledge becomes part of the company’s DNA.
What’s guided you through the most difficult moments?
Our mission. We’re not just building software for compliance: we believe Prewave can help prevent the next Rana Plaza. Today we monitor over two million suppliers and send alerts to more than 250 enterprise customers. The more customers we reach, the more impact we can have. That alignment between revenue and impact has kept us going. Of course we care about growth and value creation; we’re a venture-backed company. But knowing that what we’re building actually matters keeps us very motivated also on hard days.
“Vienna is an underrated city for startups. We have a lot of talent here, but we’re not yet competing with too many later-stage startups or big tech companies. That’s a real advantage when you need to hire 100 people in a year.”