Fayetteville firm SupplyPike receives $25 million in series B capital

Fayetteville-based startup SupplyPike has raised $25 million in series B capital to support its growth.

The supply chain technology company will primarily use the money to add high-tech workers. Over the next year, SupplyPike plans to add more than 60 employees in Northwest Arkansas. Most of the company’s nearly 125 employees work in Fayetteville.

TJ Sangam, co-founder and CEO of SupplyPike, said the company is building something customers want.

“We need to figure out how to build more of it,” Sangam said. “We need engineers to build the products. We need designers. We need UX (user experience) folks. We need researchers.”

He said a lot of what the company does is software that detects irregularities in the supply chain, helps clients fix the issues and get money back.

Sangam said that the company has gone from zero to being valued at $100 million in two years. Third-party companies rated SupplyPike based on various metrics, including revenue, but he said the growth rate is one of the most significant factors in determining its value.

Sangam noted that the company didn’t have a lot at the start of the pandemic. It started doing research, conducting customer interviews and building prototypes.

“Customers resonated with the problems we were solving,” he said. “Our sales were rudimentary in the beginning. We were reaching out to people we knew. But pretty quickly, we were getting a lot of traction.”

The company added staff to its sales and marketing team. It launched SupplierWiki.com, and the supplier resource site has grown to about 60,000 subscribers and led to leads for the company’s software. The company’s nearly 400 clients are consumer packaged goods (CPG) companies.

One of Sangam’s goals is to increase the scope of the problems the company is solving. It’s solved many compliance issues for clients, and he said a lot of things go wrong in the supply chain before these problems happen.

“My goal is to try and see if we can solve more upstream supply chain problems,” he said. “Compliance is a downstream problem … Can we ensure your product is in the right place, at the right location, at the right time, and in the right quantity when the customer wants to buy it? And how do we facilitate that.”

SupplyPike was established in 2017 as the research and development arm of logistics provider CaseStack. SupplyPike was spun out of CaseStack in 2018 when Hub Group acquired the Fayetteville-based company late that year.

When it started, SupplyPike worked on scheduling truckload shipments for CaseStack and maximizing the available capacity for each load.

Sangam said SupplyPike continues to maintain the level of collaboration and how to treat people well. Because SupplyPike is a software-based company, he said it moves faster and is more innovative.

“We can imagine better solutions for our customers so we can engineer it,” he said. “That’s baked into our DNA. We incorporate all the best parts of CaseStack, and add some.”

Sangam was named CEO of SupplyPike shortly before the start of the pandemic. Before that, the company was developing bespoke software for clients. He said the problem was that it’s challenging to scale, and the time to close a deal is long.

SupplyPike’s products have helped orchestrate more than $25 billion in retail sales and have helped mitigate more than $500 million in retail inefficiencies.

The company’s products connect to clients’ supply chain, including their carriers, warehouses and retailers. The company pulls data from each client’s supply chain into a database and builds a model for how it operates. That provides visibility into shipments and shows whether they will be on time and meet demand. It uses machine learning algorithms to determine how much money clients lose because of fines. The software can provide solutions and identify ways to avoid fines.

According to a news release, as part of the series B capital raise, SupplyPike will add Noro-Moseley and Frontier Growth to its board. They will join existing series A investors at Blumberg Capital.