Global supply chains have gone from dependable to high-risk overnight. Major manufacturers like Hyundai are rerouting ships around blockades, turning small disruptions into expensive reruns. Decades of chasing the cheapest parts from the farthest corners of the globe left companies exposed. A single tariff change or regional flare-up now threatens entire product lines and profit margins, as seen in India’s garment sector, where export targets evaporate and expedited freights eat into cash reserves. Proxima tackles that fragility by shifting focus from low-cost imports to local partnerships. It’s a SaaS platform—$150 per user per month—that indexes thousands of North American suppliers. Clients can search, vet and integrate supplier data via an API or pay a one-time premium for human-verified certifications. To fill the top of the funnel, Proxima offers a free “Supply Chain Fragility Calculator” and publishes landing pages for niche searches like “ISO 9001 machine shops in Ohio.” They’ve even open-sourced a Python scraper to build credibility with engineering teams. What sets Proxima apart is scale of data. They scrape government contracts, import/export records and user reviews, creating a database that legacy players like Thomasnet can’t match without years of effort. And the timing couldn’t be better: geopolitical tensions are straining even China’s manufacturing engine and critical infrastructure—think submarine cables—now a security target. On the tech side, the stack is straightforward: FastAPI and Next.js front-to-back, web scraping with BeautifulSoup and Scrapy, data wrangling in Pandas, and full-text search in PostgreSQL.