We are thrilled to announce that we have completed another round of financing for a total of $45 million! The round is being led by Sapphire Ventures, with additional investment from Insight Venture Partners and participation from our existing investors 8VC, Chicago Ventures, Emergence Capital, Omidyar Technology Ventures, OpenView Venture Partners, and Pritzker Group Venture Capital.
This round comes fewer than six months after our last round of $35 million, bringing our total investment to over $90 million.
Why Venture Capitalists are Investing in Logistics Technology and Visibility
In our most recent quarter, p44 experienced record growth, including sales to manufacturers, retailers, e-commerce providers, distributors, freight forwarders, 3PLs, TMS providers, and fast-growing start-ups.
We are seeing an intense and growing demand for products within the transportation visibility space, and collectively we decided to accelerate the business plan in order to meet the growing market demand. That means building products faster, spending more on marketing, hiring the right team, and expanding into new international markets.
Since our last round of funding,
- project44 has hired key leadership roles, driving growth and enabling the company to scale
- Customer adoption is on the rise. We have seen a 520% growth in new customers
- Our new product offerings are gaining major traction—for example, our International Parcel offering released in July has seen rapid market interest and adoption
- We have focused on growing premier partnerships with capacity providers and technology platforms, which is quickly creating massive new opportunities for the organization
Who are our new partners?
Sapphire Ventures is a venture capital firm focused on helping innovative technology companies become global category leaders. Leveraging nearly two decades of experience and an extensive global enterprise network, Sapphire Ventures invests capital, resources, and expertise to enable its portfolio companies to scale rapidly.
“project44 will not merely participate in this newly developed visibility category, but will define, grow and lead it,” said Kevin Diestel, Partner at Sapphire Ventures and new project44 board member. “p44 is bringing to the shipping and logistics space what Stripe brought to payments, Twilio brought to communications, and Mulesoft brought to SaaS applications. We invested because we believe that Jett and his team have distinguished themselves as the leading visibility platform and have both the vision and positioning to continue to push the boundaries of what’s possible.”
“We have an amazing opportunity, fantastic customers, talented team, and are the fastest-growing company in the space,” said project44 CEO and Founder, Jett McCandless. “We’re thrilled to add Sapphire Ventures and Insight Venture Partners to our other world-class investors who share our customer-centric approach, and we look to leverage their deep operational expertise as we continue the process of building an industry-defining company that connects the world’s entire transportation ecosystem in the most productive way possible.”
What’s Next?
We will use this additional capital to fund our continued growth in North America, support new product initiatives, and drive international expansion. We got to this point because of the outstanding people who work at project44, so growing our internal team is a major priority. In fact, this week also marked another important milestone for us—we now have over 100 team members! We hope to hire an additional 55 team members by year’s end. To join the project44 team, check our open positions here.
“This is an exciting time for the freight visibility market. New possibilities are opening up, technology is developing quickly in order to meet consumer needs, and the industry is embracing advanced visibility,” says Jett. “The next few years are going to crucial for scaling the visibility market, and this investment gives us the runway to continue leading the charge.”