It appears that investments in the supply chain sector are still vigorous, as Pando, a firm that builds fulfillment management technologies, stated that it has now collected $45 million overall following a $30 million Series B funding round.
Iron Pillar and Uncorrelated Ventures spearheaded the investment, and were joined by prior backers Nexus Venture Partners, Chiratae Ventures and Next47. Chief executive and creator Nitin Jayakrishnan expressed that the fresh capital will go towards broadening Pando’s international sales, advertising and distribution capacities.
He said to TechCrunch via email that they will not be increasing into different industries or related product areas. He added that skilled personnel is the base of their business and they will carry on enlarging their teams in all aspects of the business. Furthermore, Pando will look into potential partnerships and takeovers, with the recent funding.
Jayakrishnan and Abhijeet Manohar, both of whom had previously worked together at iDelivery, an Indian freight technology market place, worked together to establish Pando. Even though they had been in their first business venture together, they saw that companies manufacturing, distributing and merchandising were struggling with existing tech and single fixes in trying to comprehend, upgrade and control their worldwide logistics activities, which is what Jayakrishnan explained.
Executives in the supply chain industry had attempted to craft their own technology and hiring personnel in an effort to solve the issue. This piqued our curiosity and we questioned people in warehouses, factories, freight yards and ports. In consequence, in 2018, we launched Pando with the aim of making a software-as-a-service platform, which could deal with global logistics.
Jayakrishnan is right that there is a lot of repressed demand in store for supply chain visibility tools. A McKinsey survey recently concluded that 2/3 of the companies they had surveyed had already established dashboards to facilitate this, with more than half investing further in such services.
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Pando aims to meet the need by consolidating data from a wide range of sources, including customers, suppliers, logistics service providers, facilities, and product SKUs. The platform provides various tools and apps to help with freight procurement, trade and transport management, freight audit and payment, and document management, as well as dispatch planning and analytics.
Pando’s platform is customizable and allows customers to create their own tools and apps using Pando’s APIs. The focus on no-code capabilities and differentiation from incumbents such as SAP, Oracle, and Blue Yonder sets Pando apart from its competitors.
He noted that Pando already has an automatic connection to popular enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, as well as prepared application programming interface (API) and a staffed team of professionals to attach to any new ERP and business system. Furthermore, Pando’s ability to customize interactive applications without any coding keeps the basic platform intact, and there is no extra need to depend on IT support for every adaptation.
Pando also uses algorithms and different forms of artificial intelligence to make predictions about supply chain events. For instance, the system looks for the best possible way to link customers and suppliers by thinking about components like cost and environmental impact, and the best way to make deliveries. In addition, Pando can detect oddities in deliveries, orders, and freight bills and predict supply chain difficulties based on current demand and supply levels.
Pando isn’t the only one taking on this kind of venture. Altana, who obtained a hundred million dollars worth of venture capital in October, implements an AI system to combine and attain knowledge from supply network logistics and B2B data, ultimately giving rise to a shared overview of these systems. Everstream, a challenger of Pando, has their own dashboard for data analysis, which can be integrated with existing ERP, transportation management, and SRM systems.
Pando has been quite successful in selling its product, as is evidenced by the big names they’ve recruited to use it – giants such as Procter and Gamble, Johnson & Johnson, Valvoline, Castrol, Cummins, Siemens, Danaher, and Accuride. Since their Series A round of funding in 2020, the business has seen an 8x growth in revenue, and a 5x increase in customers, according to Jayakrishnan.
Jayakrishnan was upbeat when questioned about if the broadening would last for a long time coming, with certain signs showing potential difficulties ahead. He referred to a Deloitte report uncovering that more than 70% of manufacturing businesses had been influenced by supply chain disturbances in the last year, with 90% of those businesses suffering from higher expenses and a drop in productivity.
It appears that the digital logistics market is set to experience substantial growth in the near future. According to Markets and Markets, this sector is expected to jump from $17.4 billion in 2019 to $46.5 billion by 2025. Moreover, Crunchbase has recorded a surge in investment activity with over $7 billion invested in supply chain-oriented startups from January to October 2022, close to 2021’s extraordinary high.
Jayakrishnan noted that Pando’s financial position is solid, with a focus on making more money. They are preparing to expand their presence in North America, Europe, and India, having secured successful business deals and multiple reliable partners. Given all of this, Pando is ready to take advantage of the foreseeable expansion and provide flexible supply chain solutions for the economy in 2030.
