For project44 — now valued at $2.7 billion after its latest funding round — it may no longer be a matter of if the Chicago startup goes public, but when.
"We are definitely preparing the company operationally to be a public business," Jason Duboe, chief growth officer at project44, told Chicago Inno. "But we only view the public event as just another financing event. It's another milestone. We intend to operate this business for many decades."
The company announced an $80 million funding round on Thursday. Project44 also received a $420 million investment in January and raised $202 million last June as the company's valuation has increased 12% since the beginning of the year.
"Heading into 2020, the business was valued at sub $1 billion," Duboe said. "The importance of digitization, industry-wide in the supply chain really started to accelerate [over the course of Covid]... and I think there's a lot that has transpired in the last two years in terms of tailwinds that we’ve benefited from that continue to this day."
Project44 works with more than 1,200 companies to improve their global supply chains and ensure on-time delivery of shipments, address supply chain disruptions, and move goods efficiently.
The funding round — led by Generation Investment Management and A.P. Moller Holding, a privately held investment company based in Denmark — will be used to drive initiatives that measure and mitigate supply chain emissions globally, across all modes of transportation.
Project44 opened new offices in Japan, New Zealand and Australia earlier this year and continues to have its sights set on the future. Whether the public markets open up again is a different story, Duboe said.
"We’re controlling what we can control by hiring a management team and executives that have public company experience and have operated within the public domain," he said.
