Logistics giant Maersk is investing in UK start-up 7Bridges, which is using artificial intelligence (AI) to transform supply chains.

The company has raised $17m in a series A round led by Eight Roads, with strategic investment from Maersk Growth. There was also support from existing investors Local Globe and Crane. The start-up plans to use the money to help businesses enhance their supply chains.

“This latest funding round will help us achieve our mission of using transformational technologies to enable supply chains that are customer centric, resilient to disruption, more cost-effective, help to decrease waste, improve access to goods worldwide and ultimately, autonomous,” said co-founder Philip Ashton.

For the next 12 to 18 months, the company says it will focus on increasing the reach of its proprietary AI-powered logistics platform. In practice that means continuing to grow its commercial team and investing in technology and data. This should enable it to transform more supply chains and deliver responsive, flexible, sustainable and cost-effective logistics to its customers and consumers.

Today the 7Bridges platform is already used by some of the world’s top ecommerce, retail, pharmaceutical and manufacturing brands giving them increased logistics visibility and the ability to orchestrate and execute operations across their supply chains.

“We’re looking forward to working with many more businesses in the coming months as they upgrade their logistics technology from the status quo,” said Ashton. “Our technology is now more important than ever before. In the last two years, global supply chain performance has been brought into sharp focus by the pandemic and has had a profound impact on people’s lives. However, while Covid may have exposed and accelerated supply chain fragilities it was not the cause.”

Historically, he said, businesses had been struggling to rewire their supplier and distribution networks. For years they have been grappling with disconnected data, siloed and outdated technologies, and time-intensive manual processes. The result is wasted time, resources and money; up to half of logistics spend is squandered. A study by McKinsey found that 85% of supply chain executives pointed towards such inefficiencies in their digital technologies as a cause for concern.

“At 7Bridges, we are uniquely positioned to help businesses enhance and future-proof their supply chains in ways that are more sustainable, resilient, cost-effective and efficient,” said Ashton.

By harnessing artificial intelligence to make coherent rapid and adaptive decisions across channels, product categories, geographies and service providers, the company says it can transform multiple elements of the supply chain, from planning to execution, inbound and outbound logistics, inventory optimisation to customer experience.

The partnership with Maersk should also provide its clients with more informed, predictive and insightful supply chain decision making thanks to the synergies between 7Bridges’ AI and Maersk’s global logistics network and data.

“The last two years have drawn supply chains directly into the commercial spotlight,” said Oliver Finch, investment partner at Maersk Growth. “There is an urgent need to innovate in the sector and maintain access to goods we rely on. 7Bridges has developed novel technology to digitalise the design, management and optimisation of supply chains. 7Bridges will enable a wider range of businesses to better harness the power of data and AI to support commercial decision-making. We believe 7Bridges has the potential to address a largely unmet market need and significantly improve companies’ supply chains.”

Investor Eight Roads is a global venture capital firm managing $8bn of assets across offices in the UK, China, India, Japan and the USA.

“Almost every shipper is facing significant supply chain challenges from rising costs and a changing regulatory environment, and lack the tools and know-how to navigate them,” said Davor Hebel, managing partner at Eight Roads. “7Bridges is creating a new category of value optimisation software for logistics which has historically only been a service available to the largest shippers from consultants. We are incredibly excited to partner with the 7Bridges team as they look to scale the business.”

The start-up was founded by Philip Ashton and Matei Beremski in 2016. Ashton had spent time working at a speciality logistics provider, and saw first-hand the challenges that companies faced with their logistics. Money and resources were being wasted consistently by organisations of all sizes and across all industries as they attempted to wrestle their supply chains into an efficient state. He saw that the problem was systemic, but realised it was possible to solve them.

Beremski, a long-time friend, was at IBM at the time, where he was building machine-learning methods into web applications at the early days of the big data boom. Seeing the size of the opportunity and the transformative potential of a data-driven approach to logistics, they decided to start 7Bridges to bring a new way of thinking to the market.

Together, they built smart technology that would offer automated, scalable and profitable logistics. They were soon joined by Ben Ede, a technical entrepreneur with over 20 years of experience in high-growth tech businesses. The team has since expanded across Europe and the USA, and supports users around the world.