FarEye, maker of a SaaS delivery management platform that gives shoppers delivery windows as short as an hour, has raised $100 million in a Series E round led by TCV and Dragoneer Investment Group, along with existing investors Eight Roads Ventures, Fundamentum and Honeywell.
As part of the funding round, Gopi Vaddi, a general partner at TCV, will join FarEye’s board of directors. This is the company’s third funding round since 2020, bringing the total raised to $153 million.
FarEye, based in in Chicago and founded in India in 2013, plans to further the capabilities of its delivery automation platform, while expanding in Europe and North America and bringing on new hires in marketing, sales and development. Among its 150 retail and ecommerce customers are Dominoes, Walmart, Amway, DHL eCommerce, Finland Post and Singapore Post.
Kushal Nahata, CEO and co-founder of FarEye, said the company’s aim is to provide an Amazon Prime-like experience for retailers and logistics providers, analyzing data feeds from carriers in real time to offer up the best delivery options to shoppers, while balancing speed and cost for its customers through a form of arbitrage. It provides order tracking and visibility from first to final mile.
That data can indicate things like the recent on-time performance of various carriers in an area or ZIP code, and where they’ve had capacity constraints, balanced against the time sensitivity of the order. It can also determine how many delivery drivers are in the vicinity, if orders can be bundled, and the maximum number of items one driver can carry. More than 2 million vehicles and 25,000 drivers are in FarEye’s database.
“We help brands, retailer and logistics providers run all types of deliveries through a single platform,” Nahata said. “It could be same or next day or multiple days, as well as returns and curbside. Every decision from order to door is handled by the technology itself, with no human intervention in the journey. You can offer multiple competing delivery time slots to the consumer. Once the order is placed, the system chooses the right carrier.”
Nahata said FarEye’s software tracks the entire delivery journey, providing information and updates to the consumer. He said the platform combines delivery management with high visibility, offering shoppers multiple delivery slots at checkout including one-hour windows. FarEye’s other “secret sauce,” Nahata said, is its configurability. Retailers can personalize the platform to quickly launch new delivery models.
With adoption high and a hot market in the pandemic era, Nahata said retailers he’s talking to have truncated 3-5-year delivery upgrade projects into 3-6-month ones. “It’s become a boardroom conversation,” he said. “They need to launch faster delivery services and offer more convenience as the ecommerce share is increasing. In a couple of years, every brand will be delivering product directly to the consumer, either using their own fleet or a third party. How do you move forward in this journey? That’s the market we’re going after.”