Supply-Chain Startup Project44 Raises $100 Million In Series D Round

Supply chain technology startup project44 raised $100 million in a Series D funding round led by existing investor Insight Partners, with additional support from Eight Partners VC LLC, Emergence Capital Partners, Omidyar Technology Ventures, Sapphire Ventures LLC, Sozo Ventures and Underscore VC.

“We are the connective tissue for logistics and supply chains,” project44 Co-Founder and CEO Jett McCandless told The Wall Street Journal on Monday (Dec. 21).

The new funds will be used to grow its supply-chain visibility software and expand business for a possible public stock offering in the future. The funding is part of the growing support of logistics providers and supply chain that is focused on developing and executing new technology solutions.

“Covid accelerated the role of technology for supply chains,” Ryan Yost, a vice president at Avery Dennison Corp., a Glendale, Calif.-based manufacturer of industrial packaging, told WSJ. “What we thought was on the horizon for 2025 will be implemented in 2021.”

The project44 platform gives companies the ability to see where their shipments are in the supply chain. Using application program interface (API) technology, the platform gleans information from freight transportation and logistics firms and makes it understandable for retailers, manufacturers and shippers.

The supply chain software market expanded 8.3 percent last year to reach over $15 billion in revenue amid “increasing need for agility, end-to-end visibility and supply chain resilience,” according to an analysis released in June 2020.

Co-founded in 2014 in Chicago by McCandless and Wally Ibrahim, the firm has since raised about $241 million, including the new funding round and two rounds in 2018 that were six months apart.

McCandless did not say what the company’s valuation will be after this new funding round, but bookings were up 139 percent year over year in the first half of 2020. A $45 million investment round in October 2018 valued project44 at “slightly less than half a billion,” McCandless said at the time.

The April PYMNTS report, “B2B Payments: COVID-19 Impact Report,” done with American Express, takes a deep dive into how the pandemic is reshaping B2B supply chains, logistics and payments.

Taylor Allis, chief product officer at Avetta, said in a PYMNTS interview that supply chain risk is growing as more businesses struggle to survive in today’s volatile market.