TORONTO: FedEx makes strategic investment in Chennai startup FourKites

TORONTO: FedEx and supply chain visibility startup FourKites are partnering to make supply chains smarter by bringing highly granular visibility into multi-modal and multi-carrier operations.

FedEx has also made an undisclosed strategic investment in the Chennai-based startup as part of this collaboration. The tie-up comes at a time when Covid-19 pandemic, ongoing geopolitical issues, port congestion, and other disruptions have strained supply chain operations globally.

FourKites’ real-time visibility platform currently supports 2.5 million shipments a day, connecting the supply chains of 50% of Fortune 500 companies. Through this collaboration, FourKites will be using its machine learning and artificial intelligence capabilities with data insights from the FedEx network — which reaches more than 220 countries and territories, linking more than 99% of the world’s GDP, through more than 16.5 million shipments daily — to create a new end-to-end supply chain intelligence platform called FourKites X.

FourKites X will provide tools and insights to help large shippers and logistics providers via a suite of offerings ranging from planning and pre-shipment, to visibility and proactive alerts, to supply chain optimization insights.

“If the last two years have taught us anything, it’s that companies need to work together in order to work smarter and faster. Our collaboration with FourKites creates a data ecosystem that will deliver a new level of predictability and visibility to help businesses build smarter supply chains in today’s unpredictable and complex business environment,” Sriram Krishnasamy, CEO, FedEx Dataworks, said.

“Our organisations share an unwavering commitment to customer success through strategic innovation. Together, we are working to pave the future of global supply chains, built on a foundation of data and machine learning to deliver new value to those global supply chains,” said Mathew Elenjickal, FourKites founder & CEO.

FedEx Dataworks, a business unit in FedEx focused on making supply chains smarter through a powerful data science approach and machine learning capabilities, will support FourKites’ development of the new platform, FourKites X. Customers of FourKites X will be able to integrate the platform with existing systems, and they will be able to receive new capabilities in a modular way with support from data engineers, data scientists and user experience experts.