For over 1,200 global giants, including Coca-Cola, Pepsi, P&G and Walmart, the city centre of the Chennai/US-based Unicorn FourKites has helped in solving an important issue of tracking their shipments globally.

The entire global supply chain platform of FourKites was built out of the Chennai centre over the last nine years, said the company’s CEO Mathew Elenjickal, an alumnus of the College of Engineering, Guindy.

FourKites extends visibility beyond transportation into yards, warehouses, stores and beyond. Tracking more than 3 million shipments daily across road, rail, ocean, air, parcel and last mile, and reaching over 200 countries and territories, FourKites combines real-time data and powerful machine learning to help companies digitise their end-to-end supply chains, he told businessline.

Focus areas

“From Day 1, the company’s focus was on the mission to drive end-to-end supply chain orchestration, with visibility as the foundation. The future of supply chain visibility is here, and we’re continuing to push those boundaries every day,” he told businessline. Out of the total 650 employees globally, nearly 370 are in India with most of them part of the Chennai centre, he added.

“We now follow the hybrid model and don’t force employees to come back to the office. However, if they wish to return to office, the company has provided good infrastructure,” he said recently at the inauguration of a new office in Chennai.

“Now we see an opportunity to even go beyond just development. In addition to development, we are looking at creating Centres of Excellence for various departments in Chennai. This is something that we are going to be investing heavily in the next 12 to 18 months. So for the Chennai centre, the importance is going to grow and the interactions are going to be more. It is a unique advantage for us. We have the centre from day one. The Centre has been from day one, and this makes it very special for us. And it’s delivering. We grew from zero to $100 million in the last six years,” he added.

“With FourKites, you connect with the largest global network of supply chain data on the planet. This gives you the most accurate expected time of arrival, greater network collaboration and a single source of truth for all your visibility data,” he said.

Fund raised

So far, the company has raised $240 million from investors like Bain Capital, THL, Zebra, Qualcomm, Fedex and Mitsui. With the latest round from Fedex and Mitsui late last year, the company was valued at $1.05 billion, thus becoming a Unicorn, he said.

“In 2019, we were approaching $20 million annual recurring revenue. This year, we will be ending at $100 million ( ₹700 crore),” he said.

“We are looking at 20-30 per cent growth in the number of people from where we are right now and 30-40 per cent growth in annual investment in Chennai,” he said. “We spend nearly $30 million a year on people, infrastructure and travel,” he added.

FedEx has invested money in FourKites, which now has access to unique data from Fedex network, many aircraft and warehouses generating large volumes of data. “We get access to their data and develop applications using their data. We sell those applications back to the Fedex customers, and we have revenue share,” he said.

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