Alexandria's TransVoyant Inc. — whose data analytics platform targets a common pain point nowadays in supply chain logistics — has raised $3.2 million, or a little more than half of its latest funding goal, to help double both its headcount and headquarters space this year.
TransVoyant pitches a software platform that uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to provide logistics data, down to the locations of ships in the sea, planes in the sky and warehouses on land and how things like weather, temperature or facility disruptions might affect the manufacturing or shipping process.The platform manages the delivery of about 30% of all pharmaceuticals in North America, for example, including vaccine doses for New Jersey pharmaceutical giant Merck & Co. Inc. (NYSE: MRK), according to Dennis Groseclose, president and CEO of TransVoyant.
To increase its client list, which currently includes the likes of Bridgestone Corp., United Healthcare and Motorola Solutions, per its website, the company aims to raise a total $6.2 million in a new funding round that began in mid-May and has garnered three investors thus far, according to a Securities and Exchange Commission filing. Founded in 2012, the company said it has raised more than $30 million, starting with seed funding from CIA investment arm In-Q-Tel and equity financing in December co-led by the $500 million Merck Global Health Innovation Fund and P74 Ventures.
Today, it counts 140 employees in the U.S., Eastern Europe and Asia Pacific. Groseclose said he plans to secure more office space in the East Coast for proximity to schools with data science talent, such as Carnegie Mellon University or Virginia Tech, but hasn't narrowed down just where yet. This much he knows, he said — he plans to expand to a second floor of the Alexandria office building at 5845 Richmond Highway, where TransVoyant occupies a single floor now. That's to help accommodate a planned doubling of the company's employees, with adds coming to the sales department in particular.
“It’s a matter of being better at what I call the front-end execution of the business, which is sales and marketing,” Groseclose said. “We didn’t invest in that very much.”
Groseclose himself has bounced from the public to private sectors, serving as deputy director of launch programs systems contracts for the U.S. Air Force before a stint helming supply chain management at IBM Corp. (NYSE: IBM). As vice president of operations of Boston-based C-bridge Internet Solutions, he joined when the internet services provider had seven employees and helped it reach 700 employees and complete a $64 million initial public offering in 1999. Though, it later saw annual revenue droop during the dot-com bust until it underwent a restructuring and layoffs and, eventually in 2001, sold in an all-stock deal to eXcelon Corp. Just before founding TransVoyant, Groseclose worked as executive vice president at The McLane Group, a holding company based in Temple, Texas, and headed the homeland security business, public-private partnerships and other operations at Lockheed Martin Corp. (NYSE: LMT) of Bethesda.
“Working at Lockheed Martin, I learned more about risk management, finance, intellectual property protection,” Groseclose said. “Things like how to deploy your cash, how much do you use your Treasury, how to put processes around how much you invest versus how much you don't on different projects. There's a culture of discipline and financially driven risk management in a company like Lockheed that has just been a blessing that I had that experience.”
He declined to give exact revenue figures for TransVoyant but said it's grown 25% a year for the last four years as it's worked to capitalize on some of the hype around AI and emphasis on supply chain issues, which continue to be a major hassle for countless industries since 2020. Though, that's been a gift and a curse, according to Groseclose. On the plus side, the company has attracted three executives in the first quarter of 2023 that Groseclose says “two years ago wouldn't have ever talked to us.” In May alone, TransVoyant brought on Llamasoft, Medtronic, Frito-Lay and PepsiCo alum Allison Fowler as its first chief product officer and Interos and Omnitracs alum Charles Virden as its first senior vice president of customer growth.
But on the down side, what shines isn't always gold. The glitz and glamour surrounding AI technology today isn't always good for the industry.
“There's a lot of companies that are just fogging up the marketplace with hype, and supply chain software’s got a history of overpromising and underdelivering,” Groseclose said.
Its plans to invest in new marketing is one way he said TransVoyant hopes to cut through that noise — and the difficulty of getting clients to change their distribution systems, piece by piece.
“People that walk in and say we're going install this, and it's going to run your supply chain on Day One — it's impossible and not because the technology works or doesn't work,” Groseclose said. “It's because the whole company has been built around a different way to make decisions, a different siloed approach as opposed to an end-to-end approach. And it takes time to get the humans and the organization to adopt that change.”
