Just under a year after raising $24 million from backers like DHL, Everstream Analytics, a company that provides predictive insights for physical supply chains, has secured a new round of funding.
Everstream announced that it has raised $50 million in a Series B round led by Morgan Stanley's 1GT Fund with participation from StepStone Group and Columbia Capital. Julie Gerdeman, CEO of Everstream, says the fresh capital will go into product development, recruiting and customer success efforts.
“Solving supply chain challenges has never been more important and never received more attention from shareholders,” Gerdeman said. “Everstream has increased revenue 30 times from the initial investment made by Columbia Capital three years ago and was able to double the business in both 2021 and 2022.”
Everstream's growth is not happening in isolation. Startups selling supply chain technology continue to attract major investor attention and dollars. Towards the end of March, IntegrityNext, which helps organizations audit their supply chain partners for compliance with environmental and sustainability governance (ESG) rules, raised $109 million from backers, including EQT Growth. That massive tranche came on the heels of supply chain security software provider Overhaul scoring $73 million and just under a year after Tive, a developer of supply chain visibility tools, scored $54 million. $XNUMX million in an equity investment.
Given the events of the past year and the turnaround, it's not too surprising that the supply chain segment has been strong in the face of macroeconomic headwinds that have plagued other start-up categories. China implemented strict lockdown measures against COVID-19 outbreaks. The war between Ukraine and Russia continued unabated. Inflation accelerated. And parts of Europe faced unusually high temperatures and dry conditions.
According to a recent poll For Capgemini, companies see supply chain disruption as the top risk to business growth, ahead of rising commodity prices and the energy crisis. Supply chain resiliency is now a key business priority, with 43% of organizations planning to increase investment there.
Still, not all companies have been so lucky. Funding for supply chain startups in the third quarter of 2022 fell to $3.300 billion, down 56% year-on-year and down 37% compared to the second quarter. according to to the data.
Gerdeman says that what helped Everstream stay ahead of the competition was its "big data" approach. The platform combines data based on supply chain interactions with artificial intelligence and analytics to generate strategic risk scores, assessed at the material location, supplier and facility level.
Everstream offers its own charts for data analysis, but also integrates with existing enterprise resource planning, transportation management, and supplier relationship management systems.
In one step through the data analysis pipeline, Everstream collects trading data from sources including news and media articles and applies algorithms to identify who is trading with whom. It's one of the toughest problems in supply chain management to solve, Gerdeman says, because of the way supplier names are represented, misspelled, abbreviated and translated on customs customs forms. Hundreds of different systems.
“Everstream is equipped with a comprehensive view of risk from the component level to materials, over the counter to the consumer,” Gerdeman explained. “We combine AI predictions and intelligence-driven models with expert human analytics and real-world, in-the-moment insights from a global network of partners, enabling us to provide visibility to deliver a comprehensive view of all variables impacting the business. of a company. supply chain, from port jams or labor unrest to weather disruptions up to 15 days in advance.”
Everstream's other advantages are its access to proprietary data sources, Gerdeman says, as well as its "deep expertise" in meteorology. The weather may seem far removed from supply chain issues. But Everstream employs a team that monitors weather-related risks, including climate change and related access to water and heat, which Gerdeman says can inform a company's decisions about where to build manufacturing facilities. .
Everstream recently expanded its ESG tools to measure commodity risks and human rights violations, Gerdeman said, such as forced and child labor at the sub-level of the supply chain. Some Everstream customers, he added, are using them to ensure exports are screened against the risk of forced labor in specific areas of China, such as the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region.
“The need for public-private sector collaboration to address supply chain challenges has never been more obvious or more pressing,” Gerdeman said. “Our customers are made up of some of the biggest brands in the world. They need a solution that provides them with a standardized view of risk and disruptions in their global supply chain during planning and execution, whether it be challenges or disruptions to identify demand dips in key markets, maintain supplies of raw materials or components, receive insolvency notices. within your supplier network, assessing risk during transportation planning, or understanding ETA deviations for shipments in transit.”
As for Gerdeman's reference to big brands, Everstream does, in fact, have a surprising clientele, ranging from tech giants like Google to beverage, scientific, and home health companies like Abbott, Medtronic, Boston Scientific, Bayer and AB InBev. In total, Everstream has more than 200 enterprise customers and anticipates "substantial" growth this year.
To support that growth (assuming it happens, of course), Everstream plans to grow its 200-person workforce by 10-15% this year with a particular focus on the data science, sales, product management, and marketing teams. customer development and success. .
