Seed round led by Expa will help drive innovation, giving a traditional, paper-based, $1 trillion steel industry access to a new way to buy and sell steel, a seamless way to connect with new buyers and sellers and manage their supply chain
Felux, the fastest growing B2B marketplace and supply chain platform for the steel and industrial industry, announced the company has raised $5.1m in seed funding led by Expa, with participation from 8VC and Lightbank.
Felux aims to transform the traditional offline, trillion-dollar steel industry by helping bring commerce and inventory online, so the industry has a digital solution to manage their supply chains, purchasing, procurement and logistics. The Felux platform offers the ability for both buyers and suppliers to connect directly with thousands of potential new customers, provides technology to manage both sourcing and procurement, facilitates logistics, financing and payments to both sides of the market.
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Felux was founded in 2019 with the goal of creating a platform that would help bring the steel industry online. Most inventory today lives in legacy systems, pdfs and paper documents, significantly reducing the supplier’s ability to create a seamless purchasing experience with their customers. As a result, companies must contend with low visibility into pricing, inventory levels and rely on past customer relationships creating large price disparities in the market.
Felux is currently experiencing a period of rapid growth and utilization. In the past 12 months, it has facilitated more than $90 million in transactions. The platform now has over 1,500 customer locations ranging from fortune 500 companies, mills, service centers, brokers & traders, and manufacturers located throughout the United States, Canada and Mexico.
“The era of digitization in the steel industry has arrived. Over the last 12 months, we have been working tirelessly building tools for the industry to help suppliers and buyers get their inventory and catalogs online, manage logistics and get access to best-in-class financing rates. Because of this, we have been able to create a consumer-like purchasing process for an extremely complex transaction and offline industry. As a result, we are seeing more frequent transactions from our customers, suppliers are getting larger margins on deals and buyers are finding new suppliers with better pricing even with the global supply chain crunch and rising steel prices that the industry is facing,” said Dallas Hogensen, Co-Founder and CEO of Felux.
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Supply chains in the steel industry are extremely complex and as a result, many suppliers and manufacturers have been hesitant to adopt new technology, because they are expensive, outdated, hard to use and lack the ability to integrate both payments, financing and logistics into one platform. Traditionally the majority of the industry has had to result in using email-, fax- and paper-driven processes to handle the procurement, purchasing and payments of goods. Felux platform is free to buyers and alleviates the pain of sourcing, manages all of the correspondence and allows you to price against several suppliers in real time. It also allows suppliers to upload inventory directly to the marketplace via email, helping save time, money and get access to new customers that they would not traditionally do business with.
“Compared with other industries, such as media and retail, digitization in the steel and metal industries is still lagging behind. But it also means that the first mover will gain a clear competitive advantage,” said Roberto Sanabria, Managing Partner, Expa. “Felux is at the forefront of truly changing the way one of the world’s most important industries does business. We are thrilled to partner with the Felux team and support their vision of deploying agile technology that supports large-scale digitization of a backbone industry.”
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