FedEx Makes Strategic Investment In Supply Chain Visibility Startup FourKites

FedEx has made a strategic investment in the Chicago and Chennai-based supply chain visibility startup FourKites. The two companies will also partner to make supply chains smarter by bringing visibility into operations.

According to a blog post by FourKites founder and CEO Mathew Elenjickal, the company will use the funding and the partnership “to actualize our shared vision to drive customer value and make the world’s supply chains more resilient.”

This is not the first time FourKites has received a strategic investment from a big tech player. It has also received similar investments from Qualcomm Ventures and Zebra Technologies, per the CEO’s blog post.

The partnership comes when the pandemic, post congestion, the ongoing conflict in Ukraine and other geopolitical issues and other disruptions have impacted supply chain operations globally.

FourKites has a real-time visibility platform which supports 2.5 Mn shipments a day and is currently working with more than 1,000 clients. The startup also works with 50% of the Fortune 500 companies.

The startup said that this collaboration will allow it to use its machine learning and AI capabilities with data from FedEx.

Sriram Krishnasamy, CEO of FedEx Dataworks, said, “Every one of these packages is a treasure trove of data.” It should be noted that FedEx connects 220 countries and territories, or more than 99% of the world’s GDP with 16.5 Mn shipments a day.

The companies will collaborate to create a new end-to-end supply chain intelligence platform called FourKites X. This will provide tools and insights to help shippers and logistics companies. The companies will offer a number of products under the FourKites X suite, including planning and pre-shipment, visibility and proactive alerts and supply chain optimisation insights.

“Through these solutions, we will deliver comprehensive supply chain intelligence — providing prescriptive analytics that can optimize supply chains, unlocking meaningful efficiency by lowering costs, driving higher service levels, improving communication and creating greater network transparency,” Elenjickal’s blog post read.

“If the last two years have taught us anything, it’s that companies need to work together in order to work smarter and faster. Our collaboration with FourKites creates a data ecosystem that will deliver a new level of predictability and visibility to help businesses build smarter supply chains in today’s unpredictable and complex business environment,” Krishnasamy added.

Elenjickal added, “Our organisations share an unwavering commitment to customer success through strategic innovation. Together, we are working to pave the future of global supply chains, built on a foundation of data and machine learning to deliver new value to those global supply chains.”

In a blog post on FourKites’ website, Elenjickal talked about the partnership between FedEx and FourKites, and what it means for both the parties.

He said that the strategic investment made by FedEx was not a typical round of funding, but rather “a highly targeted investment from an industry leader who shares our vision for highly orchestrated, self-healing, sustainable supply chains.”