Startup of the month: Expancy

Today, we have the opportunity to interview Alexis Quilichini, CEO and co-founder of Expancy.

Great to have you, Alexis. For a start, could you give us a brief description of what Expancy does?

Expancy is a Logistic Intelligence SaaS that allows managers of supply chain departments to control their transport invoices, monitor the performance of their carriers and track their CO2 emissions. Our goal is to help brands reduce their transport budget, and make decisions easily through data analysis. We bring transparency to the brand-carrier relationship.

How did you come up with the idea?

Before Expancy, I used to work at parcelLab for three years as Key Account Manager. ParcelLab is a SaaS that replaces carrier communications during the last mile delivery, in order to use delivery notifications as a powerful marketing & loyalty channel.

During this experience, my clients asked me a lot if we could develop something to control their carrier invoices. It appears that a lot of billing errors happen every month and it is not easy to control.

However, parcelLab didn’t want to launch this feature. While digging in interviews with some potential customers, I realized that other features could help Transport Managers to better manage their business. So with my co-founder Vincent, we decided to create Expancy.

It’s always great to see when product originate from market pains that the founders themselves have experienced. Give us a little more information about you as a founding team. How did you meet and how are you working today?

We are two co-founders, Vincent and myself. We met during our MBA 8 years ago and we always wanted to create a business together. After many projects we had worked on together but didn’t launch, we thought Expancy was the most serious idea we had so far.

Vincent is the tech guy, with a strong background in web-app development. On my side, I am the Business guy. I have worked 7 years in the SaaS industry as Marketing Manager, Sales Executive and Key Account Manager.

Let’s focus on your customers for a while. What’s the specific problem you’re solving with Expancy?

We bring more transparency in the brand – carrier relationship.
On some topics, invoicing for example, brands are often lost and don’t really understand what they are paying – Zone, Weight, Extra costs, etc..
We make complex topics simple by analysing data and creating reports.
Thanks to our solution our customers are able to reduce their transport costs by 5 to 10%.

What’s the secret sauce behind that?

We are not a plug and play solution, our system is really flexible to connect with all data sources and manage all the exceptions. Also, we want to give the brands some freedom with the platform so they can have the dashboards that really matters to them.

Who are the target customers for your plattform?

We can work with all the brands that are sending more than 250k parcels per year. A few examples are WeTheNew in France and Stikets in Spain

Do you already have data on the savings customers can achieve through Expancy? What was the most surprising insight for you so far when checking the correctness of transport cost?

It really depends on the carriers you work with, but in average we can reduce transport budget by 5 to 10%.

We don’t just spot discrepancies in the invoices, we help brands avoid paying some overcharges by making some adjustment on their side. This can be a huge savings lever.

Expancy is still very young. What is to be expected in the next months product wise but also from Expancy as a company?

On the product side, we are going to start the development of a claim management system, to help brands manage more efficiently their transport claims, in order to gain productivity and save money.

On the business side, we are launching a one-shot offer mid-february to audit carriers invoices. Meaning we will analyze invoices on a certain period, no need to subscribe to a yearly plan. Our goal with that offer, is to help brands realize the potential ROI of Expancy and be able to defend the project internally.

During 2023, we will start to create partnerships with other SaaS and 3PL. As one example, ee recently built an API connection for Sendcloud customers in order to facilitate our integration with SendCloud users. And we will continue to build this kind of API, to facilitate the deployment of our solution.

Thank you, Alexis, for the insightful answers and perspectives! We’re excited about what the future holds for you and Expancy.

You cannot wait to learn more about the future of Supply Chain? Check out our SCM Startups Handbook 2022 where you will discover hundreds of innovative supply chain solutions.

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