Shippeo announces record $40m funding round to accelerate global supply chain resilience
The investments will support Shippeo’s mission to help shippers and carriers run more collaborative, automated, sustainable, profitable, and customer-centric supply chains.
Paris, France - October 24, 2022 - Shippeo, a global leader in real-time multimodal supply chain transportation visibility, today announced a record-breaking fundraising round of $40 million, boosting investment to date to over $110 million, as the company ramps up global expansion of its best-in-category visibility platform.
All existing investors took part in the new round, including Battery Ventures, Partech, NGP Capital, ETF Partners, Bpifrance Digital Venture and SAP.io, alongside new strategic investors Hong Kong-based LFX Venture Partners and Japan-based Yamaha Motor Ventures, whose investment will help to ramp up operations across Asia-Pacific.
The investments will support Shippeo’s mission to help shippers and carriers run more collaborative, automated, sustainable, profitable, and customer-centric supply chains, leveraging global partner networks, real-time data and AI to enable greater ecosystem collaboration. Regarded by many companies as the heart of their operations, supply chains can now benefit from highly accurate, real-time operational visibility and perfect workflow orchestration, which have become crucial for overcoming the unprecedented challenges, uncertainty, and financial fallout from disruption that organizations continue to face.
“Given the challenging economic climate we find ourselves in, the fact that each of our existing investors took the opportunity to reinvest is a strong vote of confidence in us, thanks to the considerable growth rates and enviable customer satisfaction levels we’ve managed to maintain,” explains Shippeo CEO Pierre Khoury. “Benefitting from the addition of some notable new investors, this fundraising round is the largest ever for a supply chain visibility software in Europe, helping us bolster our sound financial position for many years to come, and accelerating our ongoing North American and APAC expansion, while giving customers and partners confidence in the longevity potential of our partnerships.”
Impressive growth trajectory
In the last 12 months, Shippeo’s company valuation has grown 70%, with a lean approach to cash burn helping to preserve a secure financial position and clear path to profitability. Over the past 3 years, Shippeo has expanded from a regional leader to a global leader in real-time shipment visibility, growing subscription revenues 80% year on year, and adding 150 global enterprise-level customers to its books, including Coca-Cola HBC, Renault, AkzoNobel, Philip Morris International, and Jaguar Land Rover. In parallel, the company has kept churn rates below 4%.
Having launched in the North American market earlier this year, Shippeo’s expansion is maintaining momentum through a recently announced partnership with e2open (NYSE: ETWO), the connected supply chain SaaS platform with the largest multi-enterprise network. Shippeo’s carrier network also grew to over 150,000 across the globe, with active shipment tracking in 92 countries, across all continents, including complex regions for tracking such as the Middle East, Africa and Asia Pacific.
Supporting growth was a tripling of team size to over 220 people. The company has welcomed several world-class executives, including London-based Anand Medepalli as Chief Product Officer, previously at BlueYonder and ServiceNow, Paris-based Philippe van Hove as Chief Revenue Officer, previously at Zuora and Lacework, and San Francisco-based Chris Mazza as SVP of International Growth, previously at ClearMetal.
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The company has also been recognized as a global industry leader in the G2 Fall 2022 Grid Report for Supply Chain Visibility for the fourth consecutive time, based on a high customer satisfaction score and large market presence. In the same report, Shippeo was voted number one easiest platform to use, with 98% of users rating the platform a four or five out of five stars.
Best-in-category data quality, capabilities, and user experience
Shippeo's ambition is to be the leading supply chain operating system, enabling fully automated and sustainable supply chains across the world, offering the highest data quality and ETA accuracy available on the market. Earlier this year, Shippeo announced several major product developments offering new features and capabilities for customers. These included an enhanced world-class ocean tracking solution, with a breakthrough user experience and powerful monitoring capabilities, as part of the first truly singular platform available on the market for tracking end-to-end shipments across all transport modes. Shippeo also debuted a new carbon visibility dashboard to simplify CO2 emissions monitoring from transport and distribution activities for both shippers and carriers. In parallel, shipment tracking ETA accuracy was boosted by a giant 32% and rail visibility capabilities enhanced via a new partnership with leading rail and intermodal transport management system provider Everysens.
Michael Brown, General Partner at Battery Ventures, is delighted with Shippeo’s prospects. “We see a bright future ahead for Shippeo. The fact that the company continues to attract and deliver for such high-caliber enterprise-level customers is a testament to their team’s focus on customer centricity from product development, through to solution consulting, deployment, and support. What’s more remarkable is that they’ve managed to achieve a market leadership position with comparatively lower funding and better cash efficiency versus some of their direct competitors, due to strong leadership and the highly capable team they’ve attracted.”
Logistics real estate developer Prologis today named a new chief executive, saying the company’s current president, Dan Letter, will succeed CEO and co-founder Hamid Moghadam when he steps down in about a year.
After retiring on January 1, 2026, Moghadam will continue as San Francisco-based Prologis’ executive chairman, providing strategic guidance. According to the company, Moghadam co-founded Prologis’ predecessor, AMB Property Corporation, in 1983. Under his leadership, the company grew from a startup to a global leader, with a successful IPO in 1997 and its merger with ProLogis in 2011.
Letter has been with Prologis since 2004, and before being president served as global head of capital deployment, where he had responsibility for the company’s Investment Committee, deployment pipeline management, and multi-market portfolio acquisitions and dispositions.
Irving F. “Bud” Lyons, lead independent director for Prologis’ Board of Directors, said: “We are deeply grateful for Hamid’s transformative leadership. Hamid’s 40-plus-year tenure—starting as an entrepreneurial co-founder and evolving into the CEO of a major public company—is a rare achievement in today’s corporate world. We are confident that Dan is the right leader to guide Prologis in its next chapter, and this transition underscores the strength and continuity of our leadership team.”
The New York-based industrial artificial intelligence (AI) provider Augury has raised $75 million for its process optimization tools for manufacturers, in a deal that values the company at more than $1 billion, the firm said today.
According to Augury, its goal is deliver a new generation of AI solutions that provide the accuracy and reliability manufacturers need to make AI a trusted partner in every phase of the manufacturing process.
The “series F” venture capital round was led by Lightrock, with participation from several of Augury’s existing investors; Insight Partners, Eclipse, and Qumra Capital as well as Schneider Electric Ventures and Qualcomm Ventures. In addition to securing the new funding, Augury also said it has added Elan Greenberg as Chief Operating Officer.
“Augury is at the forefront of digitalizing equipment maintenance with AI-driven solutions that enhance cost efficiency, sustainability performance, and energy savings,” Ashish (Ash) Puri, Partner at Lightrock, said in a release. “Their predictive maintenance technology, boasting 99.9% failure detection accuracy and a 5-20x ROI when deployed at scale, significantly reduces downtime and energy consumption for its blue-chip clients globally, offering a compelling value proposition.”
The money supports the firm’s approach of "Hybrid Autonomous Mobile Robotics (Hybrid AMRs)," which integrate the intelligence of "Autonomous Mobile Robots (AMRs)" with the precision and structure of "Automated Guided Vehicles (AGVs)."
According to Anscer, it supports the acceleration to Industry 4.0 by ensuring that its autonomous solutions seamlessly integrate with customers’ existing infrastructures to help transform material handling and warehouse automation.
Leading the new U.S. office will be Mark Messina, who was named this week as Anscer’s Managing Director & CEO, Americas. He has been tasked with leading the firm’s expansion by bringing its automation solutions to industries such as manufacturing, logistics, retail, food & beverage, and third-party logistics (3PL).
Supply chains continue to deal with a growing volume of returns following the holiday peak season, and 2024 was no exception. Recent survey data from product information management technology company Akeneo showed that 65% of shoppers made holiday returns this year, with most reporting that their experience played a large role in their reason for doing so.
The survey—which included information from more than 1,000 U.S. consumers gathered in January—provides insight into the main reasons consumers return products, generational differences in return and online shopping behaviors, and the steadily growing influence that sustainability has on consumers.
Among the results, 62% of consumers said that having more accurate product information upfront would reduce their likelihood of making a return, and 59% said they had made a return specifically because the online product description was misleading or inaccurate.
And when it comes to making those returns, 65% of respondents said they would prefer to return in-store, if possible, followed by 22% who said they prefer to ship products back.
“This indicates that consumers are gravitating toward the most sustainable option by reducing additional shipping,” the survey authors said in a statement announcing the findings, adding that 68% of respondents said they are aware of the environmental impact of returns, and 39% said the environmental impact factors into their decision to make a return or exchange.
The authors also said that investing in the product experience and providing reliable product data can help brands reduce returns, increase loyalty, and provide the best customer experience possible alongside profitability.
When asked what products they return the most, 60% of respondents said clothing items. Sizing issues were the number one reason for those returns (58%) followed by conflicting or lack of customer reviews (35%). In addition, 34% cited misleading product images and 29% pointed to inaccurate product information online as reasons for returning items.
More than 60% of respondents said that having more reliable information would reduce the likelihood of making a return.
“Whether customers are shopping directly from a brand website or on the hundreds of e-commerce marketplaces available today [such as Amazon, Walmart, etc.] the product experience must remain consistent, complete and accurate to instill brand trust and loyalty,” the authors said.
When you get the chance to automate your distribution center, take it.
That's exactly what leaders at interior design house
Thibaut Design did when they relocated operations from two New Jersey distribution centers (DCs) into a single facility in Charlotte, North Carolina, in 2019. Moving to an "empty shell of a building," as Thibaut's Michael Fechter describes it, was the perfect time to switch from a manual picking system to an automated one—in this case, one that would be driven by voice-directed technology.
"We were 100% paper-based picking in New Jersey," Fechter, the company's vice president of distribution and technology, explained in a
case study published by Voxware last year. "We knew there was a need for automation, and when we moved to Charlotte, we wanted to implement that technology."
Fechter cites Voxware's promise of simple and easy integration, configuration, use, and training as some of the key reasons Thibaut's leaders chose the system. Since implementing the voice technology, the company has streamlined its fulfillment process and can onboard and cross-train warehouse employees in a fraction of the time it used to take back in New Jersey.
And the results speak for themselves.
"We've seen incredible gains [from a] productivity standpoint," Fechter reports. "A 50% increase from pre-implementation to today."
THE NEED FOR SPEED
Thibaut was founded in 1886 and is the oldest operating wallpaper company in the United States, according to Fechter. The company works with a global network of designers, shipping samples of wallpaper and fabrics around the world.
For the design house's warehouse associates, picking, packing, and shipping thousands of samples every day was a cumbersome, labor-intensive process—and one that was prone to inaccuracy. With its paper-based picking system, mispicks were common—Fechter cites a 2% to 5% mispick rate—which necessitated stationing an extra associate at each pack station to check that orders were accurate before they left the facility.
All that has changed since implementing Voxware's Voice Management Suite (VMS) at the Charlotte DC. The system automates the workflow and guides associates through the picking process via a headset, using voice commands. The hands-free, eyes-free solution allows workers to focus on locating and selecting the right item, with no paper-based lists to check or written instructions to follow.
Thibaut also uses the tech provider's analytics tool, VoxPilot, to monitor work progress, check orders, and keep track of incoming work—managers can see what orders are open, what's in process, and what's completed for the day, for example. And it uses VoxTempo, the system's natural language voice recognition (NLVR) solution, to streamline training. The intuitive app whittles training time down to minutes and gets associates up and working fast—and Thibaut hitting minimum productivity targets within hours, according to Fechter.
EXPECTED RESULTS REALIZED
Key benefits of the project include a reduction in mispicks—which have dropped to zero—and the elimination of those extra quality-control measures Thibaut needed in the New Jersey DCs.
"We've gotten to the point where we don't even measure mispicks today—because there are none," Fechter said in the case study. "Having an extra person at a pack station to [check] every order before we pack [it]—that's been eliminated. Not only is the pick right the first time, but [the order] also gets packed and shipped faster than ever before."
The system has increased inventory accuracy as well. According to Fechter, it's now "well over 99.9%."