Marc Dragon, Managing Director of Reefknot Investments
Temasek-backed Reefknot Investments announced today it has made a strategic investment into Silicon Valley-based Roambee, an on-demand supply chain startup. This follows the latter’s Series B1 fundraise led by Swiss-based Anchor Group, which totalled in excess of US$18 million.
The fresh funds will go towards furthering Roambee’s technological capabilities and global expansion into new markets, including Asia. It seeks to open its Southeast Asian headquarters in Singapore by Q1 2021. Besides, the supply chain startup disclosed it is talking to key strategic investors as part of their plan to close Series C funding by Q2 2021.
Launched in 2018, Reefknot Investments is a Singapore-based VC firm seeking to invest in logistics and supply chain startups. Roambee will be the firm’s third major investment, joining Previse, an AI B2B financing platform and Secondmind, a platform that uses Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning to aid humans in making complex business decisions.
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Co-founded by Sanjay Sharma and Vidya Subramanian in 2014, Roambee claims it provides “enterprise-grade” Internet of Things (IoT) with on-demand, worldwide real-time location and condition monitoring for shipments and in-field assets. Its sensor technology and AI-based platform allow clients to integrate and manage data from multiple sources to produce “actionable” insights, down to the item level.
It is currently present in the US, Mexico, Brazil, UK, Germany, UAE, India, and Indonesia.
Roambee shared it experienced both new and existing customer growth in 2020, with sales orders doubling from 2019. It also entered into contracts with new customers. Notable clients include Lenovo, Mondelez and the United Nations World Food Programme.
“The pandemic has changed the dynamics of supply drastically, lengthening any recovery period. Our goal is to expand our platform’s capabilities to include more sensor and non-sensor data sources to eliminate disruptions and reduce risks in the supply chain,” shared Sharma, who is also the CEO.
“Roambee’s platform is uniquely positioned to support its clients as well as the industry’s push towards on-demand multi-modal Supply Chain Visibility and insights. This aligns with our mandate to invest in transformative technologies that drive supply chain and logistics evolution,” said Marc Dragon, Managing Director of Reefknot Investments.
Based on a research report by Markets and Markets, the IoT cloud platform market is expected to grow from US$6.4 billion in 2020 to US$11.5 billion by 2025. Companies, especially manufacturers from the pharmaceutical sector, are looking for AI-based demand sensing algorithms to simulate multiple scenarios and plan their distribution well in advance as they witness supply-side disruptions and demand contraction.
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Image Credit: Reefknot
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