Waybridge, a supply chain platform for raw materials, recently announced it has raised $30 million in Series B funding. The round was led by Rucker Park Capital and Craft Ventures with participation from past investor Venrock. The company has raised a total of $40 million since 2019.
Waybridge’s platform offers transparency and order management for companies to buy and sell raw materials, keep track of inventory, and manage the supply chain process of those materials.
Much like the transportation industry, it was historically managed by manual processes that made it difficult to automatically price both the material and the shipping costs associated with moving these heavy goods.
In an interview with FreightWaves, the co-founder and president of Waybridge, Scott Evans, explained this was the problem the company decided it wanted to solve.
“I noticed something happening more and more frequently: The people that were working [in the raw materials space] were able to manage their entire life outside of work on sites like Facebook and Amazon with a click of a few buttons,” he said. “Then they would come back to their workspace and try to manage these [raw materials] trades on these 20-year-old software systems … . There was a large amount of venting and frustration coming from their trading desks as they would wait hours for updates on what inventory was available to buy or sell.”
Much like transportation markets, raw materials prices can fluctuate often. It is important for materials traders to have open visibility on where the right-priced material is and include the shipping costs that could be associated with buying from different vendors.
“One of our customers said, ‘We need a radar on what’s coming into our operations,’” Evans said. “They want to buy and sell with better precision and have better working capital planning, which all goes into good manufacturing operations. So we said, ‘What kind of cloud solution can we build here to create this end-to-end trade management platform where they can have visibility to run their enterprise better?’”
The platform offers insight on trade finance, traceability and sustainability to help these raw materials traders optimize their current business and scale with ease.
Waybridge plans to use the funds to accelerate its current raw materials offerings and expand into other industries that lack visibility into their supply chains as well.
“We’re not going to be just investing in enhancing the current platform and expanding our customer base,” Evans explained. “We are going to start looking at other verticals and value props around sustainability, start looking at how we can connect our customers with banks or other working capital providers and with logistics providers. We want to start creating a connective tissue between our clients and their supply chain ecosystems so we can help them automate and achieve operational excellence.”
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