Dev

Roambee raises $15.2 million to track physical assets with AI


An astonishing 55% of small businesses that deal in physical assets don’t manage them in any way. Those inclined to track their assets, however, are among Roambee’s clientele. The Santa Clara, California-based startup provides on-demand shipment and asset monitoring for companies in the logistics, transportation, finance, pharmaceutical, and automotive industries, with products that combine internet of things sensors and AI with robotic process automation to deliver insights and streamline operations.

After raising a combined $10.2 million across four funding rounds, Roambee today announced that it has snagged an additional $15.2 million in series B funding led by Anchor Group and Comcraft, with participation from Jebsen & Jessen, Telkomsel, and industrialist Anant Singhania. CEO Sanjay Sharma, who noted that the funding comes after a year in which Roambee experienced 100% year-over-year growth, said it will fuel the expansion of operations and the acceleration of sales globally.

“Customers begin by using our service as an early warning system to eliminate disruptions and reduce risks in their supply chain,” he added, pointing out that nearly 60 million industrial assets are expected to be connected by narrowband IoT devices by 2026.  “We then extend our value proposition by providing insights and foresights to streamline and optimize their operations. Anchor’s investment is a strong validation of our technology and our team.”

Roambee’s Honeycomb platform — which leverages an array of technologies, like IoT, the low-powered wide area network radio standards NB-IoT and Sigfox, GPS and GSM, Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), and Wi-Fi to track assets on the move — supports scenarios such as pharmaceutical cold chain, spoilage, damage, and trailer and container monitoring and security. When it comes to deployment, network admins have a choice:

  1. asset tracking with light infrastructure, which requires Raombee’s BeeRouter and BeeBeacon Aware products
  2. asset tracking without infrastructure, which taps the company’s BeeAware universal tracking tag
  3. shipment monitoring with portable infrastructure, which draws on Raombee’s entire hardware catalog including the BeeAware, BeeLock (a keyless GPS smart lock) BeeFleet (a location monitoring device for vehicles), BeaBeacon Aware, and BeeBeacon Sense (a temperature and condition data logger)
Roambee

Above: A portion of the Roambee hardware product lineup.

Image Credit: Roambee

Sensor devices are provisioned through integrations, and vendors’ enterprise software can be integrated using Roambee’s APIs or AI bots. Honeycomb identifies key events in the supply chain or asset management operations, including ETA changes, route deviations, temperature excursions, unauthorized stops, restricted time movement, tampering with goods, theft of goods, and damage to goods. It can also derive insights from patterns and data like delivery schedules, rectifications, asset ages, and dwell times.

Using Roambee’s inventory monitoring web dashboard, customers can book inventory tracking tags, routers, and support wherever they need them, and they’re able to set up virtual zones within any facility. If they choose to, they can cover more facilities by letting Honeycomb marry live data like humidity, air pressure, ambient light, shock, acceleration, tilt, and more with automation and predictive analytics that suggest the best course of action.

Honeycomb keeps tabs on inventory across categories, product types, zones, facilities, and geographies and conducts audits to surface the status and location of physical goods. The suite optimizes warehouse layouts to reduce pick time and uses prescriptive insights to minimize safety risk, and for good measure it tracks reusable shipping assets across facilities, users, and even geographies.

Roambee’s tools can facilitate the recovery of missing or stolen containers wherever they are and detect instances of theft, pilferage, or misappropriation patterns by location, transporter, vendor, and customer. Moreover, it’s able to take into account data trails and asset routing automations to speed up retrieval, recovery, issue analysis, and conflict resolution.

“As the only company to collect, translate, and transform data into actionable intelligence operating globally, we believe that Roambee is already materially disrupting the logistics industry and well poised to drive and benefit from further transformation of supply chains,” said Anchor Group managing partner Dweep Chanana. “Roambee delivers a proven end-to-end goods and asset monitoring solution,” Chanana continued. “As a first step to creating connected supply chains, their integrated approach has resonated strongly with major enterprises who are undertaking major deployments — establishing Roambee as a clear leader in this field. We are excited to support them in scaling up to meet demand as more organizations recognize the need for and value from real-time supply chain monitoring.”

Roambee has regional offices in Mexico, Brazil, the U.K., Germany, the United Arab Emirates, India, Malaysia, and Indonesia. And the company claims over 60 partners and 200 paying customers worldwide, including Denso, Anheuser-Busch InBev, Parkmail, and the Volkswagen Group.

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