CargoSense, a platform that drives transformative supply chain automation using visibility data, announced today an initial close on an $8 million Series A investment round, led by Lanza techVentures. Merck Global Health Innovation Fund (MGHIF) has joined the round as a strategic investor, along with SmoothBrain, channel partner The Pallet Alliance, and other previous private investors in CargoSense.
This investment will enable CargoSense to execute on expanding its partner ecosystem of integrated management systems, data sources, and industrial IIoT platforms available to digital agents running on the Visibility OS. This will enable CargoSense’s global customers with the tools to automate and simplify additional aspects of their supply chain operations.
CargoSense customers utilize the Visibility OS to get their supply chain systems: IIoT data sources, real-time transportation visibility platforms, risk analysis platforms, and the customer’s systems of record – all working as a unified stack through their customized digital agents running on the platform. And this unique approach to integrations enables not just the flow of data but the automation of contextual analysis and execution across any supply chain function and the operation of exception management workflows at scale.
Merck’s supply chain team is responsible for thousands of parcel shipments each day and worked with CargoSense to automate analysis of their parcel program in order to catch delivery problems in real-time and optimize decisions around distribution and packaging at the individual parcel level. The initial results led to a strategic investment from the Merck Global Health Innovation Fund to accelerate CargoSense’s efforts in bringing impactful automation to supply chains across the pharmaceutical industry and driving expansion into new markets.
CargoSense had its beginnings in utilizing IIoT, and their largest customers today are using the Visibility OS to drive automation with device data. And their automated agents handle a diverse set of responsibilities that reduce manual workloads – from updating orders in SAP and releasing payments in real-time when an order has been fully delivered, to monitoring progress and detecting divergences from the plan for a shipment and raising contextualized exceptions for global logistics teams.
Lead investor Lanza techVentures values the strategic initiative between CargoSense and a semiconductor company in the Lanza techVentures portfolio – which prompted its investment to accelerate these efforts.
KEY QUOTES:
“The broad application of CargoSense’s Visibility OS is significant and destined to completely change warehouse distribution and supply chain operations.”
- Lucio Lanza, Managing Partner of Lanza techVentures
“Buyers of visibility data and related supply chain technologies for manufacturers and distributors all share an expectation: that it will reduce workloads for their supply chain teams. The reality is frequently the opposite, where there’s a large gap between new technology and their day-to-day operations, and people bridge the gap with additional manual effort and process complexity. CargoSense is on a mission to simplify supply chain operations for any organization, but especially those with significant scale, and we thank our new and existing investors for their confidence in our team and our approach to accomplishing that mission through automation.”
“Through our experiences assisting supply chain teams in getting maximum value from IIoT deployments in warehousing and logistics, we’ve found a consistent pain point in the ability to configure complex behaviors on the devices themselves. Having to backhaul data from IIoT devices before any analysis can be performed is a drain on battery life and data plans. To address this problem, we’ve begun partnering with device vendors to explore tighter integrations between our Visibility OS and device firmware, bringing digital agents out of the cloud and on to the edge.”
- CargoSense founder and CEO Richard Kilmer
“Expanded automation and application of powerful emerging technologies offers tremendous promise to improve supply chain strength and efficiency. We are excited to explore opportunities that the predictive and autonomous features of the CargoSense offerings may provide to enable and optimize biopharmaceutical operations.”
- Joe Volpe, Managing Director, Merck Global Health Innovation Fund, who will join CargoSense’s board
“We have long invested in silicon-based technologies that could revolutionize what’s possible with embedded devices and IIoT. CargoSense’s Visibility OS, which targets automating the $10-trillion supply chain and logistics marketplace, paired with our portfolio company’s innovative hardware solutions will more rapidly unlock the business value of pervasive IIoT and its potential to redefine entire industries.”
- Michael McNamara of Lanza techVentures, who will also join CargoSense’s board
