 "Abhijeet Manohar (left) and Nitin Jayakrishnan (right)")
Iron Pillar, a tech-focused venture growth investor, has led the $30 million Series B round of Pando, a supply chain and logistics software-as-a-service (SaaS) firm. Iron Pillar has made a $12 million investment in Pando, which is based in San Jose, the US, but has product development in Chennai. Iron Pillar is also an investor in other well-known SaaS software companies, including Uniphore, CoreStack, Ushur, Servify and Jiffy.ai.
In the Pando investment, Iron Pillar was joined by Uncorrelated Ventures, prominent American CEOs and angel investors as well as existing investors Nexus Venture Partners, Chiratae Ventures and Next47. Pando’s founders and existing investors decided to partner with Iron Pillar primarily to leverage the firm’s global footprint, and hands-on approach to helping entrepreneurs, as well as an extensive network of partners and customers, especially in the US and the Middle East.
"With supply chain disruptions becoming the norm, enterprises no longer can rely on legacy and siloed logistics tools to make their products accessible, affordable and sustainable,” said Nitin Jayakrishnan, Pando’s CEO. “Pando's platform-first approach helps brands, suppliers, distributors, and retailers collaborate with agility to fulfil their orders,” he added.
In the last few years, driven by the pandemic, climate change, geo-political tensions and other factors, supply chain disruptions have become the norm. These are creating significant business challenges and hindering consumers’ access to quality products. According to a recent Deloitte survey, over 70 per cent of manufacturing executives reported that their companies have been impacted by supply chain issues in the past year, with 90 per cent of those companies experiencing increased costs and declining productivity.
As a result, global enterprises are investing heavily to make supply chains more resilient, agile and efficient. With the global logistics SaaS tech market estimated to grow to $25 billion by 2025, Pando said it is well-positioned to benefit from the broader tailwinds.
Pando provides its technology and services to enterprises such as Nestle, Nivea, Johnson & Johnson, Danaher, Accuride, Perfetti Van Melle and BP Castrol.
“Pando’s growth with multiple Fortune 500 companies is a testimony to the quality of the product and the management team,” said Mohanjit Jolly, Partner at Iron Pillar. He has joined the Board of Pando in conjunction with this investment. “It’s the vision of building a truly generational company that got us excited to partner with Abhijeet (Manohar, CTO) and Nitin (Jayakrishnan) at Pando,” added Jolly.
