Startup of the month: Wakeo

Today it is our pleasure to interview Laura Damoiseau who is a Marketing Director at Wakeo.

Laure, to start things of, can you give us a brief description of Wakeo?

Wakeo is the market leader in overseas visibility on multimodal transport flows. Leveraging data science, our platform helps shippers and logistic services providers improve performance, customer experience and reach operational excellence. Today we work with world’s leading shippers and freight forwarders such as Uniqlo, Hilti, Air Liquide, B Braun, Faurecia, Corteva, Clasquin, Gefco, QualitAir&Sea or Balguerie. Wakeo’s team has grown to 80 people today with deep expertise at the crossroads between data and supply chain.

That is an exciting topic with growing relevance especially in the recent years. How did Wakeo’s journey start at first?

Julien Cote and Loïc Marzin, Wakeo co-founders, met at PwC. While working for global enterprise organizations, they experienced the lack of visibility that international shippers were facing (and still are) in overseas transportations. As data scientist at PwC, Loic Marzin worked for global enterprises on supply chain optimizations. He realized that data and machine learning would be game changers to bring the supply chain to a new dimension. The beginning of Wakeo’s life started in 2016 and the company has been growing rapidly ever since, cumulating €15m fundraising from leading international investors including US-based Promus Ventures or Techstars, and European investors like 360 Capital and 50 Partners.

That sounds like a high-caliber setup. To get back to the solution itself: which exact problem do you solve for your customers?

Today, the simple question which many supply chain organizations are struggling to answer is: Where are my goods and more importantly, when will they arrive at their destination? This is the problem which the Wakeo solution is solving.

We provide our customers with a digital control tower to monitor all modes of transport in real-time and enable them to have end-to-end visibility on all their shipments. In addition, our platform leverages hundreds of datasources coming from transport providers and independent sources to fuel our data engine and provide dynamic predictive ETAs so our customers can anticipate deviations and take proactive actions instead of reacting to delays.

The main benefits for them are to…

…stop losing time with manual tasks and saving time for value added activities thanks to automated processes and reliable information available in one click;

…anticipate delays and disruptions to reduce emergency costs;

…objectify the performance of transport operations, helping its optimization;

…enable data driven supply chain through intelligent analytics;

…provide a better experience to their customers to improve loyalty and growth.

When talking about this and looking at other players in the market, what would you describe as your main differentiator?

One main differentiator is that our solution is multimodal from Day 1, which allows us to provide a true end to end visibility on multimodal shipments from door to door (incl. sea, air main carriage but also road either pre/post-carriage or full road shipments). One door-to-door shipment also means one global consolidated ETA, which is what our customers are looking for. For example, a 3-day delay at booking before departure can end up into a 15-day delay at the final arrival when passing on the initial delay along the entire multimodal route. This capability of managing D2D multimodal flows and predictive ETAs is unique on the market.

What are the ideal customers for your solution?

Since the beginning we have been working with international players operating in multiple continents. Our customers are two folds:

First, shippers from various industries with big volumes of overseas transportation. We can name Uniqlo in retail, the US group Corteva in agribusiness, BBraun in Germany in the medical field, Airliquide, Faurecia in the automotive industry etc..

Second, we also count many transport service providers as customers such as Fracht, Gefco, Clasquin, Qualitair and Sea.

What we are curious about hearing these names is the follwing: How does implementation and onboarding of new customers work? What are the requirements on the customer’s side and what’s typically challenging?

We have a fully dedicated project team of supply chain experts which are helping our customer at every stage of the implementation: freight forwarders and carriers onboarding, customization, go-live, and beyond and ensure the success of the project. What can typically be challenging is the number and diversity of information sources and systems to interconnect to. Thanks to our APIs and the numerous projects we have already conducted, our platform can usually easily be integrated into each and every different customers’ IT ecosystem (TMS, ERP, etc.). Our partner network includes SAP, Oracle, Cargorwise, Blueyonder, Alpega. Because the platform is easy-to-use, no real IT skills are required to start a project, which allows a frictionless onboarding of operational teams.

We already mentioned this in the beginning: In a time of shaking global supply chains and major delays for many goods, not only microchips, solutions like wakeo seem even more essential. Do you have an example of a customer of yours that could manage the difficulties of the past months more efficiently with the help of Wakeo?

The complicated global context indeed resulted in an increased need for supply chain organisations to better control the flows of goods under shipment. We witnessed an increased adoption of multimodal real time visibility solutions such as Wakeo with quick benefits from the customer side on transport cost reduction, increased productivity and better customer service.

Corteva (an American agriculture pure player with 17 billion$ of revenues) for example has been using Wakeo technology since 2021 to monitor the multimodal transport flows (sea, air road) of their seeds across different continents. Corteva calculated a project payback in 3 months. Because of the productivity savings, 3 headcounts (out of 30) could be saved to work on more value added services to their customers.

(More information about Corteva’s testimonial can be found in this video)

The market for supply chain visibility is super dynamic currently. Many new players are constantly entering it and at the same time we see established players like project44 executing acquisition strategies. What can we expect from wakeo in the future? How will you position yourself in the market? Will ESG play an even more important role in the feature set?

Our ambition is and remains to be the European market leader in multimodal visibility. We are investing heavily in R&D to constantly innovate and release new features and provide more added value on our platform for our customers. We see ESG in general and environmental footprint reduction in particular as a major challenge for the whole ecosystem for which we want to provide concrete solutions. Last year, we launched a Carbon Footprint Calculator, in line with the most advanced international regulations (GLEC, European norms).

The feature leverages our advanced visibility technology and many data points available (such as type of transport, type of vehicle, good weight, fuel type etc..) to provide a very precise calculation of Co2 and also all equivalents (like high impact gasses sulfur, methane) emissions for each individual shipment. Our Carbon footprint calculator is already used by many of our current customers such as Corteva who recently said “It’s not an approximation, it is exactly what we’ve been doing for what we‘ve been transporting” (Valerie Leblanc). Based on this environmental impact continuous reporting, our customers can now start implementing concrete carbon emission reduction action plans.

Thank you so much for this interview, Laure. The last words to our readers are yours.

We will be attending the Logistics Summit in Hamburg on Oct 5-6th. At this occasion, one of our customers Clasquin (a major European logistics service provider) will join us and share their benefits of using Wakeo’s technology. Please contact us if you are interested in meeting with us during one of those 2 days.

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

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