project44, the leading supply chain visibility solutions provider, announced it has closed a Series E investment of $202 Million led by funds managed by Goldman Sachs Asset Management (Goldman Sachs) and Emergence Capital, valuing the company at $1.2 Billion. To date, project44 has raised $442.5 Million to improve supply chain trust and predictability. Goldman Sachs has a deep history of supporting the global expansion of growth-stage technology companies and guiding them through multiple stages of growth. This financing will accelerate the company’s expanded multimodal carrier network, make significant inroads into Asian markets, expand artificial intelligence (AI) and data science capabilities, accelerate new product innovation, and bolster sales and marketing reach globally.
“We’re grateful for the confidence Goldman Sachs and our existing investors have placed in our team as we continue to solve some of the most critical supply chain execution challenges across the globe”
“We’re grateful for the confidence Goldman Sachs and our existing investors have placed in our team as we continue to solve some of the most critical supply chain execution challenges across the globe,” said Jett McCandless, CEO and Founder of project44. “project44’s solutions help enterprises deal with some of the most complex supply chain challenges facing the world today. Goldman Sachs is not only a top-tier investor, it also has the network and resources to help project44 to deliver on our strategic objective of rapid expansion into China and other Asian markets. This investment will allow us to continue hiring the best talent, accelerate our global expansion and improve our products to deliver even more value to our customers.”
“We are fully aligned with the vision that Jett and his team have set forth to build the clear global leader in supply chain visibility,” said Will Chen, Managing Director, Goldman Sachs Asset Management. “By continuing to innovate and by further extending its global reach, project44 addresses critical pain points and brings increasing value to its customers and partners, who are among the most sophisticated shippers and logistics service providers in the world.”
The company’s current investors, including Insight Partners, Sapphire, 8VC, Chicago Ventures, and Sozo, have increased their investment in the company after participating in previous fundraising rounds.
Latest Investment in Supply Chain Visibility
The investment underscores the rapid growth and maturation of the visibility category. Sophisticated late-stage growth equity investors have been actively studying the supply chain visibility market. They have recognized project44’s position as the category leader, capable of attracting and acquiring other top companies in respective categories within visibility. The investment also highlights the market’s confidence in project44’s visibility solutions – which have become a mission-critical part of the supply chain digitization ecosystem of leading shipper, forwarder, 3PL, carrier and technology platform providers.
In order to meet growing customer demand, project44 recently announced its real-time shipment tracking services in China – giving clients the same transportation visibility it offers across North American and Europe. This latest round of financing will further position project44 to deliver comprehensive, real-time coverage across Asia. This is a critical region for multi-modal and global supply chains to see further upstream into their supply chains, ensuring significantly more lead-time to manage disruptions down to inventory levels or make decisions to ensure timely delivery of critical customer orders.
Read More: SalesTechStar Interview with Dana Bjornson, Chief Financial Officer, Mylo
A Record-Breaking Year of Growth
Over the last year, project44 has helped customers to mitigate relentless volatility, bottlenecks, and logistics breakdowns – including the Suez Canal incident – where customers relied on project44 for real-time visibility into critical events and downstream supply chain disruptions. project44 is a leading provider of real-time transportation visibility with over 550 enterprise customers, including Amazon, P&G, Starbucks, Unilever, Nestle, Cargill, Lenovo, and The Bosch Group. 2021 is proving to be a massively successful year for project44, with many milestones achieved:
- Drove massive organic revenue growth. In Q1 of 2021, the company announced 135% YoY new bookings growth and recently crossed the $50M ARR milestone
- Added 250 team members in 2021, spanning eight different countries, especially in Europe
- Gartner named project44 a Leader in the research firm’s first-ever Magic Quadrant for Real-Time Transportation Visibility Platforms (RTTVP). Gartner evaluated 14 vendors, out of which, project44 received the highest placement for its ability to execute and for its completeness of vision
- Provided the most expansive and highest performing, global, over-the-road network with connections to more than 800 telematics/ELD providers, representing 94% of the European market, and over 95% parcel coverage in North America and Europe
- Successfully acquired Ocean Insights in March to expand its ocean solution by adding the broadest container tracking capabilities in the market, as well as one-of-a-kind sailing schedules and ocean analytics products
- Released all-new platform capabilities to expand value for both suppliers and shippers, including slot-bookings through the partner ecosystem, advanced ocean analytics, a truckload co-op for brokers, and driver break/layover predictions
- Launched Port Intel™ online service that provides subscribers with free reports that summarize port congestion, informs them when their containers are anchored near congested ports, and helps them make critical inventory and management decisions. project44 ocean tracking data were instrumental in identifying global supply trends on the heels of the massive Suez Canal port disruption earlier this year
- Acquired San Francisco-based ClearMetal, enabling project44 to deliver the industry’s best international shipping coverage and artificial intelligence solutions for supply chain data. The acquisition provides customers with improved supplier collaboration, end-to-end ETA accuracy, and order-level visibility
With the combination of Ocean Insights and ClearMetal, project44’s visibility and predictive analytics covers more than 55 shipping lines, 700 seaports, and more than 5,000 vessels. The company processes over five million sailing schedule changes per day while providing machine learning, ETAs and analytics down to the order level.
Strong Customer Validation for project44 Solutions
Lenovo: “Building a more predictable global supply chain to increase on-time delivery and customer satisfaction is key to Lenovo’s business strategy. It is critical to understand when materials are arriving from our suppliers to our factories across the world. project44’s expansion into the Asia Pacific region will give us further end-to-end visibility into our global supply chain to help us deliver on our promises to our customers.”
– Renée Ure, Chief Operating Officer, Lenovo Infrastructure Solutions Group
Electrolux: “We wanted to use real-time tracking for operational efficiencies. We want to increase predictability. When we started thinking about solutions like project44, we were applying real-time visibility to our factory distribution. Groupage has been our main focus.”
– Giuseppe De Vincenzi, IT Manager of European Transportation Applications at Electrolux
Unilever: “We’re transforming our technology backbone to create a highly agile, responsive and end-to-end connected supply chain. This innovation is one piece of that puzzle. It (the control tower) gives us real-time visibility of each step in the process, so we can plan better and respond quicker and, importantly, predict and proactively deal with issues.”
Read More: How To Change When Change Is Hard
