Real-time supply chain visibility company project44 has acquired last-mile tech platform Convey for $225 million. Together, the two companies will combine forces to provide end-to-end supply chain visibility, from the raw materials to the front door.
The acquisition will bolster project44’s “Real-time Transportation Visibility Platform” (RTTVP), which provides information on shipments in transit across all modes and geographies, as well as precise ETAs for deliveries, with enhanced last-mile, direct-to-consumer delivery experiences. With the acquisition, project44 will have access to Convey’s global customer base, including over 200 major brands like The Home Depot, Nieman Marcus and Ferguson Enterprises.
“project44 is solving today’s most critical business challenge – how to deliver on continuously evolving customer expectations while remaining operationally efficient during unprecedented uncertainty and growing complexity,” said Jett McCandless, CEO and founder of project44, in a statement. “The stakes are high for companies to not only fulfill and ship orders but to make the right promises about availability and delivery. However, volatile conditions, overwhelming complexity and blind spots in the supply chain make this difficult to achieve.”
Supply chain management is a hot topic the world over, with more customers relying on e-commerce for goods and experiencing unprecedented delays. The global supply chain management market size was valued at $15.85 billion in 2019, and it’s expected to reach $37.41 billion by 2027, according to an Allied Market Research report from 2020. As manufacturers around the world are still reeling from supply chain disruptions due to the pandemic, it’s not hard to see why. In a 2020 survey, 35% of respondents said cross-border transportation delays had an impact on their business.
The Convey acquisition now allows project44 to connect over 880 global shippers and third-party logistics providers with a network of 113,000 carriers, 2.6 million assets and more than 9 billion last-mile shipment events, according to the company. The outcome for clients should be optimized costs, growth in revenue, faster shipping and service and a better delivery experience overall.
Convey also brings the ability to resolve parcel delivery issues through its automated customer communication service, so project44 customers can spend less time dealing with customer service manually and more time focused on core business capabilities.
“With thousands of shipments in-flight at any point in time and the details around those orders living in many disparate systems across our organization, it can be difficult to figure out which ones need our immediate attention,” Devin Van Hout, vice president of digital commerce at Ferguson Enterprises, said in a statement. “Convey’s solution gives our team all the information we need to go from reactive to proactive, while also providing us with the tools to communicate with all relevant parties within the same view. The result is a simple, consistent customer experience in the face of massive B2B complexity.”
This is project44’s third acquisition this year, including Ocean Insights and ClearMetal. With each acquisition, project44 has been able to integrate new tech stacks in order to create a much shorter turnaround time for customers, according to the company. Earlier this month, Google chose project44 as its first strategic visibility partner for its Google Cloud Supply Chain Twin solution, an initiative designed to help organizations solve complex supply chain challenges.
With a $1.2 billion valuation status achieved earlier this year, project44 is quickly becoming one of the largest real-time logistics companies and a leader in the space.