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FourKites Raises $1.25M to Track Delivery Trucks on the Job

June 3, 2015 By Alida Miranda-Wolff
Featured on the Chicago Tribune
Some links in the supply chain are broken, or at least hidden. Chicago-based startup FourKites has raised $1.25 million in seed funding to help its customers — shippers, logistics providers and freight brokers — keep track of trucks when they’re out on the job.
“If I’m a manufacturer and I’m sending products to Walmart or Target, they ask, ‘When can I expect this truck?’” said FourKites founder and CEO Mathew Elenjickal. “There’s no way to say exactly when the truck is going to arrive.”

Hyde Park Venture Partners led the round, which included participation by Hyde Park Angels; Harvard Business School Angels; Bluestein & Associates, a Chicago-based family office; and Otter Consulting, a Boca Raton-based family office. FourKites currently operates across North America and plans to expand beyond the U.S., Canada and Mexico in the future.

“The concept works anywhere, it’s just we need to build partnerships in the local ecosystems,” Elenjickal said.

FourKites has partnered with more than 25 GPS companies to access real-time data on individual trucks, which it then delivers to customers through an online dashboard. Elenjickal said his customers are mainly Fortune 500 companies and big shippers that work with multiple trucking companies.

Currently, fleet owners track their vehicles’ locations using GPS while shipping, so Elenjickal said this is a great time to tap into that technology as adoption rises.

The U.S. Department of Transporation has proposed legislation that would mandate the use of Electronic Logging Devices on commercial trucks and buses to keep track of driver’s working hours.

As such, Elenjickal said, most shipping trucks have GPS on board, so his company procures data about them through various partnership models and charges them monthly, annual or long-term subscription fees for access to that information. He said current technologies allow companies to plan shipments but don’t allow shippers to manage logistics on the fly.

“One of the key pain points in the shipping industry right now is lack of transparency,” Elenjickal said.

FourKites will use the funding to scale up, hiring more engineers and sales and marketing employees to double the company’s headcount to 20 by year-end, and to add more features. In the future, he said, FourKites’ software could help companies streamline their back-office processes, for example.

Elenjickal founded FourKites in 2012 after spending seven years working on logistics enterprise software for companies such as i2 Technologies and Oracle. He worked on the company while completing his MBA at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management and was a 2013 Pritzker Group Venture fellow.

Email: aelahi@tribpub.com • Twitter: @aminamania