Personal blog of Yzmir Ramirez

Three University of Michigan students are building Channels Inc., a communication software tailored for physical workers, and already racking up some big customers in the event management industry.

Siddharth Kaul, 18, Elan Rosen, 20, and Ibrahim Mohammed, 20, started the company after finding some common ground in retail and events. The company’s customer list boasts names like Marriott Hotels, and it announced a $520,000 seed round, led by Sahra Growth Capital, to give it nearly $570,000 in total funding.

Kaul grew up going to a lot of events in Kuwait and Dubai, but started noticing there was a delay in things that should happen and many processes were being done on pen and paper.

“The technology that was available was inharmonious and made it hard for physical workers to fulfill tasks,” Kaul told TechCrunch. “We saw it happening in the event management space, forcing workers to coordinate across technologies.”

Legacy communication platforms like Slack are aggregating communications, but are better for remote workers; for physical workers, they rely more on text communication, he said. However, the disadvantage with texting is that you have to keep scrolling to get to the new message, and old communication is lost amid all of the replies.

They began developing a platform for small hotels to help them transition to digital and provide communication in a non-chronological order that is easier to access, enables discussion and can be searched. Users of the SaaS platform can build live personnel maps to see where employees are and what the event floor looks like, prioritize alerts and automate tasks while monitoring progress.

Marriott became a customer after one of its employees saw the Channels platform was being tested at an event. He saw employees pulling out their phones and asked the manager why they were doing that, and was told they were testing out the product and referred him to Kaul.

“What they thought was helpful was that it was communication, and though the employees were checking their phones, it was quick and they remained attentive,” Kaul said.

Channels provides a solid platform in terms of analytics and graphical representation, which is a major selling point for customers, leading to initial traction and revenue for the company that Rosen said he expects can occur at the convention level the company is striving for.

The new funding will be used to grow in development and bring additional engineering talent to the team. In addition, it will allow Kaul and Rosen to continue with their studies, while Mohammed will be doing more full-time work. They want to increase their recurring revenue in the Middle East while building up operations in the United States.

Jamal Al-Barrak, managing partner of Sahra Growth Capital, said Channels was on his firm’s radar ever since they won the 2020 Dubai X-Series competition it sponsors. As a result of winning the competition, he was able to see the founders on multiple occasions and hear their growth.

Sahra doesn’t typically invest in companies like Channels, but the firm started a “seed sourcing effort” to make investments of between $200,000 and $800,000 into early-stage companies, Al-Barrak said. Channels is one of the first investments with that effort.

“Channels is one of our first investments in this initiative and they look very promising so far even compared to our investments before we started this initiative,” Al-Barrak said. He liked the founders’ work ethic and their focus on the event industry, which he called, “historically outdated and bereft of technological innovation.”

“Sid, Elan and Ibrahim are some of the youngest yet brightest entrepreneurs I have come across to this day and I have invested in over 25 technology startups,” he said. “Additionally, I enjoyed that they had proof of concept with a prior customer base and revenue. I was most impressed by their vision past their current industry and bounds as they want to encapsulate communication for all physical workers, whether it is events, retail or more.”

Coming off a $1.5 million seed round in June, bttn. announced Thursday that it secured another $5 million extension, led by FUSE, to the round to give it a $26.5 million post-money valuation.

The Seattle-based company was founded in March 2021 by JT Garwood and Jack Miller after seeing the challenges medical organizations had during the global pandemic to not only find supplies, but also get fair prices for them.

“We went into this building on the pain points customers had dealing with a system that is so archaic and outdated — most were still faxing in order forms and keeping closets full of supplies, but not knowing what was there,” Garwood, CEO, told TechCrunch.

Bttn. is going after the U.S. wholesale medical supply market, which is predicted to be valued at $243.3 billion by the end of 2021, according to IBISWorld. The company created a business-to-business e-commerce platform with a variety of high-quality medical supplies, saving customers an average of between 20% and 40%, while providing a better ordering and shipping experience, Garwood said.

It now boasts more than 300 customers, including individual practices and surgical centers, and multiple government contracts. It is also currently the preferred supplier for over 17 healthcare associations across the country, Garwood said. In addition to expanding into dental supplies, bttn. is also attracting customers like senior living facilities and home and hospice care.

Garwood intends to use the funds to expand bttn.’s technology, sales and operations teams, and increase its partnerships. The company is also adding new features like a portal to track shipments more easily, better order automation and improve the ability to control when supplies will get to them.

Bttn. is also analyzing more of the data coming in from its marketplace to recognize where the trends are coming from, including hospitalization rates, to share with customers. For example, if hospitals are overcrowded, supply shortages will follow, Garwood said.

“The medical supply industry was built on inequity, and we have a sense of duty to build a product that enables a better future for our customers,” he added. “We can proactively let customers know that spikes are expected, provide them with correct information and give that power back to the consumers and healthcare providers in ways they never had before.”

Whereas bttn.’s first seed round was “about pouring gas on the fire,” partnering with FUSE this time around was an easy decision for Garwood, who said the firm is bringing new assets to the table.

Brendan Wales, general partner at FUSE, said via email that his firm backs promising entrepreneurs building businesses in the Pacific Northwest and discovered bttn. before they announced any funding.

He said there is massive consumerization of healthcare, most evident on the patient side for years, but now becoming so on the provider side. Medical office employees are looking for the same type of customer experience they get from online businesses they frequently shop at, and bttn. “has a relentless drive to provide the same type of experiences and interactions to health providers.”

“We fell in love with the idea of providing a transparent and delightful customer experience to health providers, something that has been sorely lacking,” Wales added. “That, tied in with a young and ambitious team, made it so that our entire partnership worked tirelessly to partner with them.”

Like “innovation,” machine learning and artificial intelligence are commonplace terms that provide very little context for what they actually signify. AI/ML spans dozens of different fields of research, covering all kinds of different problems and alternative and often incompatible ways to solve them.

One robust area of research here that has antecedents going back to the mid-20th century is what is known as stochastic optimization — decision-making under uncertainty where an entity wants to optimize for a particular objective. A classic problem is how to optimize an airline’s schedule to maximize profit. Airlines need to commit to schedules months in advance without knowing what the weather will be like or what the specific demand for a route will be (or, whether a pandemic will wipe out travel demand entirely). It’s a vibrant field, and these days, basically runs most of modern life.

Warren B. Powell has been exploring this problem for decades as a researcher at Princeton, where he has operated the Castle Lab. He has researched how to bring disparate areas of stochastic optimization together under one framework that he has dubbed “sequential decision analytics” to optimize problems where each decision in a series places constraints on future decisions. Such problems are common in areas like logistics, scheduling and other key areas of business.

The Castle Lab has long had industry partners, and it has raised tens of millions of dollars in grants from industry over its history. But after decades of research, Powell teamed up with his son, Daniel Powell, to spin out his collective body of research and productize it into a startup called Optimal Dynamics. Father Powell has now retired full-time from Princeton to become chief analytics officer, while son Powell became CEO.

The company raised $18.4 million in new funding last week from Bessemer led by Mike Droesch, who recently was promoted to partner earlier this year with the firm’s newest $3.3 billion fundraise. The company now has 25 employees and is centered in New York City.

So what does Optimal Dynamics actually do? CEO Powell said that it’s been a long road since the company’s founding in mid-2017 when it first raised a $450,000 pre-seed round. We were “drunkenly walking in finding product-market fit,” Powell said. This is “not an easy technology to get right.”

What the company ultimately zoomed in on was the trucking industry, which has precisely the kind of sequential decision-making that father Powell had been working on his entire career. “Within truckload, you have a whole series of uncertain variables,” CEO Powell described. “We are the first company that can learn and plan for an uncertain future.”

There’s been a lot of investment in logistics and trucking from VCs in recent years as more and more investors see the potential to completely disrupt the massive and fragmented market. Yet, rather than building a whole new trucking marketplace or approaching it as a vertically integrated solution, Optimal Dynamics decided to go with the much simpler enterprise SaaS route to offer better optimization to existing companies.

One early customer, which owned 120 power units, saved $4 million using the company’s software, according to Powell. That was a result of better utilization of equipment and more efficient operations. They “sold off about 20 vehicles that they didn’t need anymore due to the underlying efficiency,” he said. In addition, the company was able to reduce a team of 10 who used to manage trucking logistics down to one, and “they are just managing exceptions” to the normal course of business. As an example of an exception, Powell said that “a guy drove half way and then decided he wanted to quit,” leaving a load stranded. “Trying to train a computer on weird edge events [like that] is hard,” he said.

Better efficiency for equipment usage and then saving money on employee costs by automating their work are the two main ways Optimal Dynamics saves money for customers. Powell says most of the savings come in the former rather than the latter, since utilization is often where the most impact can be felt.

On the technical front, the key improvement the company has devised is how to rapidly solve the ultra-complex optimization problems that logistics companies face. The company does that through value function approximation, which is a field of study where instead of actually computing the full range of stochastic optimization solutions, the program approximates the outcomes of decisions to reduce compute time. We “take in this extraordinary amount of detail while handling it in a computationally efficient way,” Powell said. That’s where we have really “wedged ourselves as a company.”

Early signs of success with customers led to a $4 million seed round led by Homan Yuen of Fusion Fund, which invests in technically sophisticated startups (i.e. the kind of startups that take decades of optimization research at Princeton to get going). Powell said that raising the round was tough, transpiring during the first weeks of the pandemic last year. One corporate fund pulled out at the last minute, and it was “chaos ensuing with everyone,” he said. This Series A process meanwhile was the opposite. “This round was totally different — closed it in 17 days from round kickoff to closure,” he said.

With new capital in the bank, the company is looking to expand from 25 employees to 75 this year, who will be trickling back to the company’s office in the Flatiron neighborhood of Manhattan in the coming months. Optimal Dynamics targets customers with 75 trucks or more, either fleets for rent or private fleets owned by companies like Walmart who handle their own logistics.

While consumers and businesses continue to use their purchasing power to spin the wheels of the globalized economy, one of the companies that’s built a technology platform to help that economy operate more smoothly is announcing an investment to double down on growth.

Zencargo, which has built a digital platform to enable freight forwarding — the process by which companies organize and track the movements of items they are making and selling (and the components needed for those items) — has raised £30 million (about $42 million). Alex Hersham, the CEO who co-founded the company with Richard Fattal (CCO) and Jan Riethmayer, said that London-based Zencargo will be using the funding to open offices in the Netherlands, Hong Kong and the U.S.; to more than double its headcount to 350 from 150 today; and to begin to make moves into trade finance — a critical lever for facilitating the trading activities that are the bread and butter of Zencargo’s business.

The Series B is being led by Digital+ Partners, with HV Capital, which led its previous round, also participating. Zencargo is not disclosing its valuation, but the company — which provides services both to companies and distributors like Amazon to ship goods to its fulfillment centers, and brands like Vivienne Westwood, Swoon Furniture, and Soho Home — said that it is on track to make £100 million in revenues this year, and £200 million in 2022.

That is against the backdrop of some major world events that have both proven to be challenges as well as opportunities for the startup.

Brexit in the U.K. has created quite a mess for moving goods in and out of the country and into Europe (difficult but ultimately a net positive for Zencargo: it helps facilitate some aspects of that movement for its clients). COVID-19, meanwhile, has impacted economies (again: a difficult impact but also a positive, in that people are spending more money on goods for themselves and less on travel, leading to more demand for shipping those goods around the globe).

The Suez Canal blockage, on the other hand, also continues to loom (not great: Hersham said that Zencargo and others are still dealing with the fallout of those delays, although it’s highlighted the need for blended approaches when it comes to moving goods, with some items shipped slower by sea, and others faster by air or road). And there is the growing priority of how shipping impacts carbon footprints (an area of opportunity, interestingly: Zencargo can provide more efficient routing, and also services to consider how to carbon offset shipping activities).

The more general challenge that Zencargo is tackling goes hand in hand with our existence as consumers.

Many of us do not blink an eye when we go online or to a store to procure something, and we get whatever that happens to be right away.

But the simplicity of wanting and subsequently obtaining goods sits on top of a huge, and hugely complex, logistics operation. It might involve components, assembly or growing and processing things, shipping from one place to another, passing through multiple distribution and shipping hubs, customs, retailers and finally delivery to your store, or directly to you — a logistics chain that, taking all the world’s goods into account, has been estimated to be worth up to $12 trillion annually. Freight forwarding is the process by which all of that logistics works as it should, and in itself accounts for hundreds of billions of dollars in spend, and potentially more than $1 trillion in costs when things go awry.

Traditionally, a lot of freight forwarding work has been done offline, a messy process involving paper and faxing, prone to mistakes, over- and under-supply based on sales and typically hard to scrutinize because of the lack of centralized information. Companies like Zencargo — along with others in the same space like Flexport — have built digitized platforms to manage all of this, tracking items by SKU data, matching shipments with real-time insights into sales and demand, and balancing different kinds of freight options to provide the right items at the right time. (Zencargo works across sea, air and land freight, with sea accounting for about half of all of its traffic, Hersham said.)

Zencargo’s services arguably will continue to see demand growing in line with the growth of the logistics industry, but the curveballs of the last several years, and in the last 12 months in particular, that have impacted the shipping business lay out an interesting road ahead for the startup in the future.

“The freight industry has struggled to keep pace with innovation. Archaic processes are still in place across the board, resulting in widespread inefficiencies,” said Patrick Beitel, managing director and founding partner at Digital+ Partners, in a statement. “Zencargo’s cutting edge technologies, plus deep industry experience and knowledge, are transforming the supply chain, and that marries up perfectly with Digital + Partners’ mission to back companies with best-in-class technology and exceptional management teams. We are honoured to join them on the next stage of their journey.”

Thanks to major players like Amazon and Walmart, we’ve become accustomed to next- or same-day delivery. But the pandemic has also renewed our interest in buying from smaller businesses and retailers.

Swyft, a company that has just raised $17.5 million in a Series A, helps retailers of any size provide affordable same-day delivery. The round was co-led by Inovia Capital and Forerunner Ventures, with participation from Shopify and existing investors Golden Ventures and Trucks VC.

Swyft is a marketplace, connecting a network of shipping carriers with vendors. But the company also provides software to those carriers to make them more efficient, and turns them into a vast network that allows them to pick up more inventory without adding to their infrastructure.

In other words, several regional carriers may play a part in delivering a parcel shipped via Swyft without making any big changes to their original routes or adding new drivers, trucks, etc.

To date, major players in both shipping and retail have dominated this space, thanks in large part to their ability to deliver quickly. Swyft is looking to amass an army, for lack of a better term, comprised of all of the smaller players, including mom and pop retailers and vendors as well as smaller, regional carriers. Banded together through software, these carriers and retailers can match the scale and influence of the behemoths without spending a fortune.

Swyft was co-founded by Aadil Kazmi (CEO), Zeeshan Hamid (head of Engineering) and Maraz Rahman (head of Sales). Kazmi and Hamid both spent their careers at Amazon, working on data and last-mile operations for the behemoth. Rahman was an early employee at a YC-backed proptech startup.

The trio started asking themselves early last year why retailers weren’t able to offer same-day delivery and chose to tackle the gap they discovered.

The key ingredient to Swyft is not its aggregation of couriers, but the software it provides to them. Because Swyft is increasing demand for these carriers, it also needs to make them more efficient. The back-end software allows carriers to digitize or automate a good deal of what they’re traditionally doing by hand.

Kazmi says that Swyft is able to come in anywhere between 25-30% cheaper than the incumbent option.

“I don’t know what percent of your purchases are from Amazon, but for me it’s like 150%,” said Eurie Kim. “I’d prefer to buy elsewhere with the pandemic, and support local and independent brands, but Amazon’s trained us all to have fast and free shipping. It feels like an opportunity where the consumer experience is really lacking and the burden on merchants and retailers is extremely heavy.”

Swyft currently has 16 full-time employees; 12% percent are female and 75% are people of color, according to the company.

Since April 2020, Swyft has facilitated the delivery of more than 180,000 packages, and expanded gross margin from 78% to 82%, thanks in large part to revenue from the software side of the business and a zero-asset model.

Tive, a Boston-based startup, is building a hardware and software platform to help track the conditions of a shipment like say food or medicine to make sure it is stored under the proper conditions as it moves from farm or factory to market. Today, the company announced a $12 million Series A.

RRE Ventures led the round with help from new investor Two Sigma Ventures and existing investors NextView Ventures, Hyperplane Ventures, One Way Ventures, Fathom Ventures and other unnamed individuals. The company has now raised close to $17 million, according to Crunchbase data.

“Tive helps companies all over the world track their shipments in a very specific way,” company co-founder and CEO Krenar Komoni told me. Using a tracking device the company created, customers can press a button, place the tracker on a palette or in a container, and it begins transmitting shipment data like temperature, shock, light exposure, humidity and location data in real time to ensure that the shipment is moving safely to market under proper conditions.

He said that they are the first company to create single-use 5G trackers, meaning the shipping company doesn’t have to worry about managing, maintaining, recharging or returning them (although they encourage that by giving a discount for future orders on returned items).

Tive hardware tracker and data tracking software. Image Credit: Tive

The approach seems to be working. Komoni reports that revenue has grown 570% in 2020 as the product-market fit has become more acute with digitization hitting the supply chain in a big way. He says that in particular customers and investors like the company’s full-stack approach.

“What’s interesting […] and why we are resonating with customers and also why investors like it, is because we’re providing the full stack, meaning the hardware, the software, the platform and the APIs to major transportation management systems,” Komoni explained.

The company has 22 employees and expects to double that number in 2021. As he grows the company, Komoni says that as an immigrant founder, he’s particularly sensitive to diversity and inclusion.

“I’m an immigrant myself. I grew up in Kosovo, came to the U.S. when I was 17 years old, went to high school here in Vermont. I’m a U.S. citizen, but part of who I am is being open to different cultures and different nationalities. It’s just part of my nature,” he says.

The company was founded in 2015 and its facilities are in Boston. It has continued shipping devices throughout the pandemic, and that has meant figuring out how to operate in a safe way with some employees in the building. He expects the company will have more employees operating out of the office as we move past the pandemic. He also has an engineering operation in Kosovo.

For more than 20 years, Salesforce has been selling cloud business software, but it has also used the same platform to build ways to track other elements besides sales, marketing and service information, including Work.com, the platform it created earlier this year to help companies develop and organize a safe way to begin returning to work during the pandemic.

Today, the company announced it was putting that same platform to work to help distribute and track a vaccine whenever it becomes available, along with related materials like syringes that will be needed to administer it. The plan is to use Salesforce tools to solve logistical problems around distributing the vaccine, as well as data to understand where it could be needed most and the efficacy of the drug, according to Bill Patterson, EVP and general manager for CRM applications at Salesforce.

“The next wave of the virus phasing, if you will, will be [when] a vaccine is on the horizon, and we begin planning the logistics. Can we plan the orchestration? Can we measure the inventory? Can we track the outcomes of the vaccine once it reaches the public’s hands,” Patterson asked.

Salesforce has put together a new product called Work.com for Vaccines to put its platform to work to help answer these questions, which Patterson says ultimately involves logistics and data, two areas that are strengths for Salesforce.

The platform includes the core Work.com command center along with additional components for inventory management, appointment management, clinical administration, outcome monitoring and public outreach.

While this all sounds good, what Salesforce lacks of course is expertise in drug distribution or public health administration, but the company believes that by creating a flexible platform with open data, government entities can share that data with other software products outside of the Salesforce family.

“That’s why it’s important to use an open data platform that allows for aggregate data to be quickly summarized and abstracted for public use,” he said. He points to the fact that some states are using Tableau, the company that Salesforce bought last year for a tidy $15.7 billion, to track other types of COVID data.

“Many states today are running all their COVID testing and positive case reporting through the Tableau platform. We want to do the same kind of exchange of data with things like inventory management [for a vaccine],” he said.

While this sounds like a public service kind of activity, Salesforce intends to sell this product to governments to manage vaccines. Patterson says that to run a system like this at what they envision will be enormous scale, it will be a service that governments have to pay for to access.

This isn’t the first time that Salesforce has created a product that falls somewhat outside of the standard kind of business realm, but which takes advantage of the Salesforce platform. Last year it developed a tool to help companies measure how sustainable they are being. While the end goal is positive, just like Work.com for Vaccines and the broader Work.com platform, it is a tool that they charge for to help companies implement and measure these kinds of initiatives.

The tool set is available starting today. Pricing will vary depending on the requirements and components of each government entity.

The real question here is, should this kind of distribution platform be created by a private company like Salesforce for profit, or perhaps would it be better suited to an open-source project, where a community of developers could create the software and distribute it for free.

Global trade watchers breathed a sigh of relief on January 15, 2020.

After two years of threats, tariffs and tweets, there was finally a truce in the trade war between the U.S. and China. The agreement signed by President Trump and Chinese Vice Premier Liu He in the Oval Office didn’t resolve all trade tensions and maintained most of the $360 billion in tariffs the administration had put on Chinese goods. But for the first time in months, it looked like manufacturers, importers and shippers could start to put two difficult years behind them.

Then came COVID-19, at first a local disruption in Wuhan, China. Then it spread throughout Hubei province, causing havoc in a concentric circle that eventually engulfed the rest of China, where industrial production fell by more than 13.5% in the first two months of the year. When the virus spread everywhere, chaos ensued: Factories shuttered. Borders closed. Supply chains crumbled.

“It has had a cascading effect through the entire world’s economy,” says Anja Manuel, co-founder and managing partner of Rice, Hadley, Gates & Manuel LLC, an international strategic consulting firm based in Silicon Valley.

The crisis has caused a drastic contraction in global trade; the World Trade Organization estimates trade volumes will fall 13-20% in 2020. And spinning activity back up could be tricky: Even as China starts to get back online, the slowdown there could reduce worldwide exports by $50 billion this year. When factories do reopen, there’s no guarantee whether they will have parts available or empty warehouses, says Manuel, who also serves on the advisory board of Flexport, a shipping logistics startup. “Our supply chains are so tightly-knit and so just-in-time that throw a few wrenches in it like we’ve just done, and it’s going to be really hard to stand it back up again. The idea that we go back to normal the moment we lift restrictions is unlikely, fanciful, even.”

Getting to that new normal, though, is a job that a number of logistics startups are embracing. Already on the rise, companies like Flexport, Haven and Factiv see a global trade crisis as a setback, but also an opportunity to demonstrate the value of their digital platforms in a very much analog industry.

While human travel has become severely restricted in recent months, the movement of goods has remained a constant priority — and in some cases, has become even more urgent. Today, a startup out of Switzerland that builds hardware and operates a logistics network designed to transport one item in particular — pharmaceuticals — is announcing a significant round to fuel its growth.

SkyCell — a designer of “smart containers” powered by software to maintain constant conditions for drugs that need to be kept at strict temperatures, humidity levels, and levels of vibration, which are in turn used to transport pharmaceuticals around the globe on behalf of drug companies — is today announcing. that it has raised $62 million in growth funding.

This latest round is being led by healthcare investor MVM Partners, with participation also from family offices, a Swiss insurance company that declined to be named, as well as previous investors the Swiss Entrepreneurs Fund (managed by Credit Suisse and UBS), and the BCGE Bank’s growth fund.

The company was founded in 2012 Switzerland when Richard Ettl and Nico Ros were tasked to design a storage facility for one of the big Swiss pharma giants. The exec charged with overseeing the project brainstormed that the work they were putting in could potentially be applied to transportation containers, and thus SkyCell was born.

Today, Ettl (who is the CEO, while Ros is the CTO), said in an interview that the company now works with eight of the world’s biggest pharmaceutical companies and has been in validation trials with a further seven. These use SkyCell’s network of some 22,000 air freight pallets to move their products around the world.

The new capital will be used to expand that reach further, specifically in the U.S. and Asia, and to double its fleet to become the biggest pharmaceutical transportation company globally. With 30 of the 50 biggest-selling drugs in the world being temperature sensitive (and some generics for one of the biggest-selling, the arthritis medication Humira, now also coming out), this makes for a huge opportunity.

And unsurprisingly, several of SkyCell’s customers are working on COVID-19 medications, Ettl said, either to help ease symptoms or potentially to vaccinate or eradicate the virus, and so it’s standing at the ready to play a role in getting drugs to where they need to be.

“We are well positioned in case there is a vaccine developed. Out of the six pharma companies developing these right now, four of them are our customers, so there is a high likelihood we would transport something,” Ettl said.

For now, he said SkyCell has been involved in helping to transport “supportive” medications related to the outbreak, such as flu shots to make sure people are not falling ill with other viral infections at the same time.

SkyCell is not disclosing its valuation but we understand that it’s in the many hundreds of millions of dollars. The company had raised some $36 million in equity and debt before this, bringing the total outside funding now to $98 million.

In a market that’s estimated to be worth some $2.8 billion annually and growing at a rate of between 15% and 20% each year, there are a number of freight businesses that focus on the transportation of pharmaceuticals. They include not only freight companies but airlines themselves, which often buy in containers from third parties. (And for some more context, one of its competitors, Envirotainer, was acquired for over $1 billion in 2918; while another, CSafe, has raised significantly more funding.)

But there was virtually no innovation in the market, and most pharmaceutical companies factored in failure rates of between 4% and 12% depending on where the drugs were headed.

One key differentiator with SkyCell has been its containers, which are able to withstand temperatures as high as 60 degrees Celsius or as low as negative 10 degrees Celsius, and have tracking on them to better monitor their movements from A to B.

These came to the market at a time when incumbents were only able to (and some still are only able to) guarantee insulation for temperatures as high as 40 degrees, which was not as pressing an issue in the past as it is today, in part because of rising temperatures around the globe, and in part because of the growing sophistication of pharmaceuticals.

“We’ve found that the number of days where [one has to consider] temperature extremes has been going up,” Ettl said. “Last year, we had 30 days where it was warmer than 40 degrees Celsius across our network of countries.”

On top of the containers themselves, SkyCell has built a software platform that taps into the kind of big data analytics that are now part and parcel of how modern companies in the logistics industry work today, in order to optimise movement and best routing for packages.

The conditions it considers include not only the obvious ones around temperature, humidity and vibration, but distance and time of travel, as well as overall carbon emissions. SkyCell claims that its failure rate comes out at less than 0.1%, with CO2 emissions reduced by almost half on a typical shipment.

Together, the hardware and software are covered by some 100 patents, the company says.

Fearing weak fundraising options in the wake of the WeWork implosion, late-stage startups are tightening their belts. The latest is another Softbank-funded company, joining Zume Pizza (80 percent of staff laid off), Wag (80 percent),  Fair (40%), Getaround (25 percent), Rappi (6 percent), and Oyo (5 percent) that have all cut staff to slow their burn rate and reduce their funding needs. Now freight forwarding startup Flexport is laying off 3 percent of its global staff.

“We’re restructuring some parts of our organization to move faster and with greater clarity and purpose. With that came the difficult decision to part ways with around 50 employees” a Flexport spokesperson tells TechCrunch after we asked today if it had seen layoffs like its peers.

Flexport CEO Ryan Petersen

Flexport had raised a $1 billion Series D led by SoftBank at a $3.2 billion valuation a year ago, bringing it to $1.3 billion in funding. The company helps move shipping containers full of goods between manufacturers and retailers using digital tools unlike its old-school competitors.

“We underinvested in areas that help us serve clients efficiently, and we over-invested in scaling our existing process when we actually needed to be agile and adaptable to best serve our clients, especially in a year of unprecedented volatility in global trade,” the spokesperson explained.

Flexport still had a record year, working with 10,000 clients to finance and transport goods. The shipping industry is so huge that it’s still only the seventh largest freight forwarder on its top Trans-Pacific Eastbound leg. The massive headroom for growth plus its use of software to coordinate supply chains and optimize routing is what attracted SoftBank.

The Flexboard Platform dashboard offers maps, notifications, task lists, and chat for Flexport clients and their factory suppliers.

But many late-stage startups are worried about where they’ll get their next round after taking huge sums of cash from SoftBank at tall valuations. As of November, SoftBank had only managed to raise about $2 billion for its Vision Fund 2 despite plans for a total of $108 billion, Bloomberg reported. LPs were partially spooked by SoftBank’s reckless investment in WeWork. Further layoffs at its portfolio companies could further stoke concerns about entrusting it with more cash.

Unless growth-stage startups can cobble together enough institutional investors to build big rounds, or other huge capital sources like sovereign wealth funds materialize for them, these startups might not be able to raise enough to keep rapidly burning. Those that can’t reach profitability or find an exit may face down-rounds that can come with onerous terms, trigger talent exodus death spirals, or just not provide enough money.

Flexport has managed to escape with just 3 percent layoffs for now. Being proactive about cuts to reach sustainability may be smarter than gambling that one’s business or the funding climate with suddenly improve. But while other SoftBank startups had to spend tons to edge out direct competitors or make up for weak on-demand service margins, Flexport at least has a tried and true business where incumbents have been asleep at the wheel.