Transforming restaurants into dark kitchens and then having the food delivered has benefited the Uber Eats and Deliveroos of the startup world while getting groceries and other items to people’s houses has especially benefited Amazon and suppliers able to complete the last mile of delivery to people’s homes.
As AC Ventures, the corporate venturing unit of Mexico-based Arca Continental, writes in the January issue of Global Corporate Venturing for its transport sector analysis – out next week: “Technological transformation and covid-19 have revolutionized last-mile logistics.
“The World Economic Forum expects this industry to grow 78% globally by 2030. Conventionally, possible solutions were thought of as restricted only to elements such as the type of transport or the location of the crossdocking points.
“Now the trend is to have an efficient, holistic, end-to-end and data-driven technological approach to decision making that is focused on consumer needs.”
Behind the scenes such a rapid shift in buying patterns requires enormous logistical changes. Private equity firm Blackstone’s shift in its property division to logistics hubs versus online versus malls has benefited its returns, while Walmart thanks in part to its Prologis real estate company and corporate and innovation venturing teams has been able to pivot to the online world in a way a host of retailers have failed to do.
The end-to-end nature of logistics is putting greater pressure on sourcing items and then following them through to the customers.
Sapphire Ventures, an independent corporate venturing unit backed by Germany-based enterprise resource planning group SAP, backed the $100m series D round for Project44, a US-based startup offering real-time visibility of where goods are in the logistics system for customers such as ABB, Lenovo and PepsiCo.
And this is encouraging supply chain groups, such as JD Logistics in China, a spinoff from Amazon peer JD, to set up their own corporate venturing units to look at the blockchain and other forms of creating reliable trails on the supply chain and give people what they want, faster and cheaper than ever before.
You can see the startups tackling this field at the GCV Connect powered by Proseeder pitch event on the 22nd.
