On Wednesday, San Francisco-headquartered supply chain automation startup Locus announced that it has received $50 million in Series C venture capital. The round was led by Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund GIC, with participation from corporate VC fund Qualcomm Ventures LLC, and existing investors Tiger Global and Falcon Edge. Several angel investors joined the round, including Pine Labs CEO Amrish Rau, CRED CEO Kunal Shah, Sierra Atlantic founder Raju Reddy, and Deb Deep Sengupta, former President and Managing Director of SAP South Asia.
Locus said the funding will be used to broaden its geographical reach and build out its R&D team to expand its product line. Locus’s business is built around a scalable, smart supply chain platform based on deep machine learning and proprietary algorithms for clients in multiple industry verticles, including e-commerce, retail, e-grocery, consumer packaged goods, fast-moving consumer goods, delivery services/3PL, transportation and more. The company says its platform has generated more than $150 million in logistics cost savings, more than 70 million kilometers in transportation savings, and more than 17 million kilometers in reduced greenhouse gas emissions for its clients in North America, Europe, Southeast Asia and the Indian subcontinent.
“Quality [and] patient capital allows us to focus on path-breaking R&D, helping us deliver exceptional long term value to our customers, over incremental improvements. We will be recruiting more PhDs in our data science team and are looking to double our patents by 2022,” Locus CEO Nishith Rastogi said in announcing the round.
Rastogi added that the company is currently investing heavily in Latin America and “aggressively” building out its presence there.
“Locus’ smart product suite is optimizing supply chain efficiencies by using machine learning to deliver real-time tracking and insights for the last mile fulfillment,” said Varsha Tagare, Managing Director at Qualcomm Ventures, the venture capital arm of chipmaker Qualcomm, which participated in the round. “We’re excited to invest in Locus to enable logistics as a service and support their journey to become a global last-mile automation leader.”
NodelQ
In April, Locus rolled out Locus NodelQ, a decision-making platform for end-to-end-network and inventory optimization that automates strategic supply chain decisions in product flow, location, inventory and sourcing. The platform is programmed to optimize the movement of goods from raw materials to finished product delivery, pinpont facility locations to correct supply and demand gaps, optimize stock levels and improve sourcing.
“A black swan event like the pandemic demonstrates the importance of agility in the supply chain,” Locus Chief Business Officer Krishna Khandelwal said upon the rollout of Nodel Q this spring. “But supply chains are enormously complex, and depending on the scope of the operation, the number of factors to weigh in while making the right strategic decision is truly beyond human capacity.”
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