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.”
Supply chain planning (SCP) leaders working on transformation efforts are focused on two major high-impact technology trends, including composite AI and supply chain data governance, according to a study from Gartner, Inc.
"SCP leaders are in the process of developing transformation roadmaps that will prioritize delivering on advanced decision intelligence and automated decision making," Eva Dawkins, Director Analyst in Gartner’s Supply Chain practice, said in a release. "Composite AI, which is the combined application of different AI techniques to improve learning efficiency, will drive the optimization and automation of many planning activities at scale, while supply chain data governance is the foundational key for digital transformation.”
Their pursuit of those roadmaps is often complicated by frequent disruptions and the rapid pace of technological innovation. But Gartner says those leaders can accelerate the realized value of technology investments by facilitating a shift from IT-led to business-led digital leadership, with SCP leaders taking ownership of multidisciplinary teams to advance business operations, channels and products.
“A sound data governance strategy supports advanced technologies, such as composite AI, while also facilitating collaboration throughout the supply chain technology ecosystem,” said Dawkins. “Without attention to data governance, SCP leaders will likely struggle to achieve their expected ROI on key technology investments.”
The British logistics robot vendor Dexory this week said it has raised $80 million in venture funding to support an expansion of its artificial intelligence (AI) powered features, grow its global team, and accelerate the deployment of its autonomous robots.
A “significant focus” continues to be on expanding across the U.S. market, where Dexory is live with customers in seven states and last month opened a U.S. headquarters in Nashville. The Series B will also enhance development and production facilities at its UK headquarters, the firm said.
The “series B” funding round was led by DTCP, with participation from Latitude Ventures, Wave-X and Bootstrap Europe, along with existing investors Atomico, Lakestar, Capnamic, and several angels from the logistics industry. With the close of the round, Dexory has now raised $120 million over the past three years.
Dexory says its product, DexoryView, provides real-time visibility across warehouses of any size through its autonomous mobile robots and AI. The rolling bots use sensor and image data and continuous data collection to perform rapid warehouse scans and create digital twins of warehouse spaces, allowing for optimized performance and future scenario simulations.
Originally announced in September, the move will allow Deutsche Bahn to “fully focus on restructuring the rail infrastructure in Germany and providing climate-friendly passenger and freight transport operations in Germany and Europe,” Werner Gatzer, Chairman of the DB Supervisory Board, said in a release.
For its purchase price, DSV gains an organization with around 72,700 employees at over 1,850 locations. The new owner says it plans to investment around one billion euros in coming years to promote additional growth in German operations. Together, DSV and Schenker will have a combined workforce of approximately 147,000 employees in more than 90 countries, earning pro forma revenue of approximately $43.3 billion (based on 2023 numbers), DSV said.
After removing that unit, Deutsche Bahn retains its core business called the “Systemverbund Bahn,” which includes passenger transport activities in Germany, rail freight activities, operational service units, and railroad infrastructure companies. The DB Group, headquartered in Berlin, employs around 340,000 people.
“We have set clear goals to structurally modernize Deutsche Bahn in the areas of infrastructure, operations and profitability and focus on the core business. The proceeds from the sale will significantly reduce DB’s debt and thus make an important contribution to the financial stability of the DB Group. At the same time, DB Schenker will gain a strong strategic owner in DSV,” Deutsche Bahn CEO Richard Lutz said in a release.
Transportation industry veteran Anne Reinke will become president & CEO of trade group the Intermodal Association of North America (IANA) at the end of the year, stepping into the position from her previous post leading third party logistics (3PL) trade group the Transportation Intermediaries Association (TIA), both organizations said today.
Meanwhile, TIA today announced that insider Christopher Burroughs would fill Reinke’s shoes as president & CEO. Burroughs has been with TIA for 13 years, most recently as its vice president of Government Affairs for the past six years, during which time he oversaw all legislative and regulatory efforts before Congress and the federal agencies.
Before her four years leading TIA, Reinke spent two years as Deputy Assistant Secretary with the U.S. Department of Transportation and 16 years with CSX Corporation.
Serious inland flooding and widespread power outages are likely to sweep across Florida and other Southeast states in coming days with the arrival of Hurricane Helene, which is now predicted to make landfall Thursday evening along Florida’s northwest coast as a major hurricane, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
While the most catastrophic landfall impact is expected in the sparsely-population Big Bend area of Florida, it’s not only sea-front cities that are at risk. Since Helene is an “unusually large storm,” its flooding, rainfall, and high winds won’t be limited only to the Gulf Coast, but are expected to travel hundreds of miles inland, the weather service said. Heavy rainfall is expected to begin in the region even before the storm comes ashore, and the wet conditions will continue to move northward into the southern Appalachians region through Friday, dumping storm total rainfall amounts of up to 18 inches. Specifically, the major flood risk includes the urban areas around Tallahassee, metro Atlanta, and western North Carolina.
In addition to its human toll, the storm could exert serious business impacts, according to the supply chain mapping and monitoring firm Resilinc. Those will be largely triggered by significant flooding, which could halt oil operations, force mandatory evacuations, restrict ports, and disrupt air traffic.
While the storm’s track is currently forecast to miss the critical ports of Miami and New Orleans, it could still hurt operations throughout the Southeast agricultural belt, which produces products like soybeans, cotton, peanuts, corn, and tobacco, according to Everstream Analytics.
That widespread footprint could also hinder supply chain and logistics flows along stretches of interstate highways I-10 and I-75 and on regional rail lines operated by Norfolk Southern and CSX. And Hurricane Helene could also likely impact business operations by unleashing power outages, deep flooding, and wind damage in northern Florida portions of Georgia, Everstream Analytics said.
Before the storm had even touched Florida soil, recovery efforts were already being launched by humanitarian aid group the American Logistics Aid Network (ALAN). In a statement on Wednesday, the group said it is urging residents in the storm's path across the Southeast to heed evacuation notices and safety advisories, and reminding members of the logistics community that their post-storm help could be needed soon. The group will continue to update its Disaster Micro-Site with Hurricane Helene resources and with requests for donated logistics assistance, most of which will start arriving within 24 to 72 hours after the storm’s initial landfall, ALAN said.