China Blacklists Supply-Chain Startup Altana, Hitting Wayfair

China's Ministry of Commerce added a New York-based software company to a trade blacklist on Aug. 5, barring it from working with any individuals or companies in the country. The move targets Altana, a startup that helps retailers like Wayfair map global supply chains to uncover forced labor risks.

Beijing's action came in response to a late-July U.S. ban on imports from dozens of Chinese companies over alleged human rights abuses. Six other entities were named on the same list: nonprofit labor auditors Responsible Business Alliance and Verité Group, human-rights NGO Human Rights in China, natural-fiber lab-testing firm Stratum Reservoir, and Applied DNA Sciences, which recently changed its name to BNB Plus Corp as it shifted from fiber tracking into blockchain services.

Altana sells a platform that collects and buys data from businesses worldwide, including China, to identify potential labor abuses and track compliance with U.S. trade rules. The company's restriction on doing business inside China could make it harder to feed that data to clients like Wayfair, an online furniture retailer that sources 40 million products from 20,000 suppliers globally.

A Wayfair spokesperson told Business Insider: “While this is a new development, we remain committed to using technology to see deeper into and better understand our supply chain.” Altana declined to comment on the blacklist or its impact on the software.

Wayfair began working with Altana about two years ago, said Evan Friedler, the company's director of regulatory and government affairs. Before that, Wayfair had contracted with third parties and used internal systems to screen suppliers. “Getting to the first tier of the supply chain has historically been the easy part,” Friedler told Business Insider in a July interview. Visibility typically stopped there, leaving questionable labor practices or prohibited companies working at second- or third-tier suppliers hidden. Wayfair's growing scale and rising regulatory pressure made it critical to see deeper, and AI technology finally made that possible, Friedler said.

Altana's cofounder and CEO Evan Smith described the platform as “Google Maps for the supply chain.” The company draws from paid and free public data and secures rights to certain insights as clients' data flows through its system. Smith said Altana does not share confidential customer data like pricing or bill-of-materials details. But aggregated, non-sensitive data enriches the overall supply-chain graph. “It's a contributory network where everyone's hooking their data and their users into a platform that allows for that shared visibility,” Smith said.

At Wayfair, Altana is used for labor compliance and denied-party screening. When a supplier potentially matches a government-published list of forced labor or prohibited companies, Altana sends an alert. Wayfair's compliance team can investigate sooner than before, Friedler said. Previously, the team relied on manual signals and self-reported supplier information.

Altana also uses agentic AI workflows to ingest vast volumes of data, including the full body of U.S. Customs rulings on product classification. Wayfair workers can click into the AI's reasoning and underlying documentation to verify any flagged issue. Most alerts turn out to be false positives, Friedler said. The team confirms company names, double-checks regions, or calls suppliers for more information. Wayfair then updates the alerts on the platform with findings that would have been difficult to uncover through manual processes.

The blacklist introduces a direct obstacle to that data pipeline. How Altana will adjust its data collection or whether Wayfair's visibility into Chinese supply chains will narrow is not yet clear. The Chinese ministry did not elaborate on enforcement, and Altana declined to comment on operational changes.