Noting that investments in the supply chain sector remain robust, Pandoa startup that develops compliance management technologies, announced today that it has raised $30 million in a Series B round, bringing the total raised to $45 million.
Iron Pillar and Uncorrelated Ventures led the round, with existing investors Nexus Venture Partners, Chiratae Ventures and Next47 participating. CEO and founder Nitin Jayakrishnan says the new capital will go toward expanding Pando’s global sales, marketing and delivery capabilities.
“We will not be expanding into new industries or adjacent product areas,” he told TechCrunch in an email interview. “Great talent is the foundation of the business: we will continue to grow our teams at all levels of the organization. Pando is also open to exploring strategic alliances and acquisitions with this round of financing.”
Pando was co-launched by Jayakrishnan and Abhijeet Manohar, who previously worked together at iDelivery, an India-based charging technology marketplace, and their first startup. The two saw firsthand how manufacturers, distributors and retailers were struggling with legacy technology and point solutions to understand, optimize and manage their global logistics operations – or at least, that’s the story Jayakrishnan tells.
“Supply chain leaders were trying to build their own technology and throwing people at the problem,” he said. “This caught our attention, we spent months talking and building for business users in warehouses, factories, loading yards and ports and finally, in 2018, he decided to start Pando to solve global logistics through a software-as-a-service platform offering.”
There is some truth in what Jayakrishnan says about the suppressed demand. According to a recent McKinsey survey, supply chain companies had, and have, a strong desire for tools that provide greater supply chain visibility. Sixty-seven percent of survey respondents say they have implemented dashboards for this purpose, while more than half say they are investing in supply chain visibility services more broadly.
Pando aims to meet the need by consolidating supply chain data that resides in multiple silos inside and outside the company, including data about customers, suppliers, logistics service providers, facilities, and product SKUs. The platform provides various tools and applications to perform different tasks in freight procurement, trade and transportation management, freight auditing, payment and document management, as well as shipment planning and analysis.
Customers can customize the tools and applications or create their own using the Pando APIs. This, along with the platform’s emphasis on no-code capabilities, sets Pando apart from incumbents like SAP, Oracle, Blue Yonder and E2Open, Jayakrishnan says.
“Pando comes pre-integrated with all major enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems and has ready APIs and a professional services team to integrate with any new ERP and enterprise system,” he added. “Pando’s no-code capabilities allow business users to customize applications while maintaining the integrity of the platform, reducing the need for IT resources for each customization.”
Pando does everything possible to automate the processes in the supply chain. Image Credits: Pando
Pando also leverages algorithms and machine learning ways to make predictions about supply chain events. For example, the platform tries to match customer orders to suppliers, customers through the “right” channel (in terms of things like cost and carbon footprint), and fulfillment strategy (for example, mode freight forwarder, carrier, etc.). Beyond this, Pando can detect anomalies between deliveries, orders and freight invoices and anticipate supply chain risk given supply and demand trends.
Pando is not the only provider that does this. altanawhich raised $100 million in venture capital last October, uses an AI system to connect to and learn from business-to-business and logistics data, creating a shared view of supply chain networks. Everstreamanother rival to Pando, offers its own dashboards for data analysis, integrated with existing ERP, transportation management and supplier relationship management systems.
But Pando has a compelling sales pitch, judging by his drive. The company counts Fortune 500 manufacturers and retailers, including P&G, J&J, Valvoline, Castrol, Cummins, Siemens, Danaher and Accuride, among its customer base. Since the startup’s Series A in 2020, revenue has increased eightfold while the number of customers has increased fivefold, Jayakrishnan said.
When asked if he expects the expansion to continue in the future, given the signs of potential problems on the horizon, Jayakrishnan seemed quite optimistic. He pointed to a Deloitte survey which found that more than 70% of manufacturing companies were affected by supply chain disruptions in the past year, with 90% of those companies experiencing increased costs and decreased productivity.
The result of those big disruptions? The digital logistics market is estimated to reach USD 46.5 billion by 2025, due to Markets and Markets — vs. $17.4 billion in 2019. Crunchbase reports Investors poured more than $7 billion into seeds through growth stage rounds globally for supply chain-focused startups from January to October 2022, nearly eclipsing record 2021 levels.
“Pando has a strong balance sheet and profit and loss statement, looking forward to profitable growth,” Jayakrishnan said. “We are expanding operations in North America, Europe and India with significant customer wins and a strong partner network…Pando is well positioned to ride this wave of growth and drive supply chain agility for the global economy. 2030”.
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