Ram Radhakrishnan

Founder & CEO Silq

Last Reviewed: September 18, 2026

Executive Summary

Ram Radhakrishnan is the founder and chief executive of Silq, a supply-chain company for apparel and soft-goods manufacturing that is unusual in the sector for being partly physical. Most supply-chain software offers a dashboard that reports what has already gone wrong downstream; Silq puts its own quality inspectors on factory floors across Asia and wires what they find directly into freight and customs decisions, so that a failed inspection changes the shipment plan rather than being discovered at the port. Radhakrishnan’s argument for the company is precise: the problem in global manufacturing is not a lack of technology but a lack of structured data — factories generate enormous amounts of information that never reaches the brand in a usable form. He came to it from a decade in ocean freight, including senior product and trade-lane roles at Flexport, C.H. Robinson and Toll Group, and from a childhood around family manufacturing businesses in India. Silq has raised roughly $19.6m, including a $17.6m Series A co-led by F-Prime Capital and Flexport Ventures, and says it has processed more than $1bn in merchandise value since inception.

Career Highlights

• Founded Silq in 2020 with Vishnu Nair, who serves as chief technology officer.
• Raised a $17.6m Series A announced in March 2022, co-led by F-Prime Capital and Flexport Ventures with Eight Roads Ventures, Forum Ventures, Surface Ventures and angels participating, taking total funding to around $19.6m.
• Grew from $10m of gross merchandise value during the 2021 beta across five countries to more than $1bn in merchandise value processed since inception.
• Built a combined physical and software operation, with hubs in the United States and India and factory inspection teams across Asian manufacturing centres including Guangzhou and Ho Chi Minh City.
• Held senior roles at Flexport including Vice President and Head of Ocean Consolidations, Senior Director and Head of LCL Product, Director of Partnerships and Director of Account Management.
• Earlier worked as a trade lane manager at C.H. Robinson and at Toll Group.

Professional Journey

Radhakrishnan grew up around manufacturing. He has described watching his parents build businesses in India through difficult economic cycles, and the lesson he draws from it is about empowering capable local teams rather than controlling them remotely — which turns out to be the operating model Silq uses. He took an engineering degree and later an MBA, and went into freight.

His logistics career ran through trade-lane management at Toll Group and C.H. Robinson and then into Flexport, the digital freight forwarder, where he spent several years and held a succession of increasingly senior roles: account management, partnerships, and then product leadership for less-than-container-load shipping, ultimately as Vice President and Head of Ocean Consolidations. LCL is one of the more operationally complex corners of ocean freight — many shippers’ goods consolidated into one container — and it gave him unusually direct exposure to where apparel supply chains actually break. The recurring failure was not in the freight leg. It was upstream, in the factory, where a quality problem or a production delay was typically invisible to the brand until goods were already moving or already rejected.

He founded Silq in 2020, during the pandemic, alongside Vishnu Nair as chief technology officer, with Kate Alexander joining in operations leadership. The design followed from the diagnosis. Rather than building another visibility dashboard on top of data the brand did not have, Silq assembled its own inspection workforce in the countries where the goods are actually made — India, China, Vietnam — and used those inspections as the data source. The platform then unifies the three decisions that are usually made by three different parties: whether the goods passed, how they ship, and how they clear customs.

The commercial proof point came quickly. Silq processed $10m in gross merchandise value across five countries during its 2021 beta, and in March 2022 announced a $17.6m Series A co-led by F-Prime Capital and Flexport Ventures — the venture arm of his former employer — with Eight Roads Ventures, Forum Ventures, Surface Ventures and angel investors participating, bringing total funding to about $19.6m. Radhakrishnan said the capital would go towards more factory partnerships, more on-site inspectors across Asia, and further technology development, with expansion into additional regions in Asia and Latin America. The company has since reported passing $1bn in cumulative merchandise value through the network, while remaining focused on soft goods — apparel, footwear, home textiles and accessories — with a stated longer-term ambition to generalise the model to other consumer manufacturing categories.

Education

Montclair State University

MBA

Sources disagree on the concentration, giving it variously as International Business and as Business, Management and Marketing.

Anna University

Bachelor of Engineering, Aeronautical Engineering

This entry rests on aggregated secondary listings rather than a primary record and should be treated as provisional.