Roambee acquires Modum to boost cold chain

  • June 14, 2021
  • Steve Rogerson

Californian supply chain visibility provider Roambee has acquired Modum, a Swiss pharma last kilometre-focused cold-chain monitoring player.

This acquisition will enable Roambee to expand its cold chain visibility offering from end to end, covering primary, secondary and the last kilometre delivery use-cases to firm up its position for real-time cold-chain monitoring.

Roambee’s real-time supply chain visibility platform combines first-hand sensor inputs and non-sensor data to enable the delivery of shipments and assets on time, in full and in top condition. More than 300 users around the world, including a large US-headquartered Covid-19 vaccine-maker, leverage Roambee’s supply chain signals and intelligence to drive logistics automation.

Modum, founded in 2016, offers proven pharma-grade monitoring and has raised $13.5m since its inception. Modum’s plug-and-play technologies work even in the difficult logistics scenarios requiring high volume and minimal touch, such as last kilometre delivery transactions. Its low unit cost of monitoring and adherence to all pharma quality compliance requirements enables companies such as Swiss Post with last-kilometre delivery visibility.

Modum has developed innovations to bring transparency and integrity of location and condition data by using methods such as two-factor authentication to associate wireless loggers with shipments and feed data into blockchain networks for authenticity.

“Joining forces with Roambee was natural for Modum due to our shared mission to ensure the timely availability of effective, original products in the medical supply chain,” said Simon Dössegger, Modum’s CEO. “Modum will enhance Roambee’s cold-chain footprint with a proven last-mile visibility technology to extend the Roambee product proposition to unique global end-to-end visibility. When combined with Roambee’s strong multimodal shipment monitoring capabilities, we can offer granular visibility all the way from manufacturing to a patient’s home at scale.”

Sanjay Sharma, CEO of Roambee, added: “While most visibility service providers claim to deliver real-time visibility, they rely on carrier data. Insights will never be as granular, real time and accurate as sensor driven insights, which is key to logistics automation. With Modum, Roambee will enable customers to automate their logistics through radically simple access to sensor-driven signals, delivered by our immersive, location-aware platform, not only for pharma, but also for fresh produce and food and beverages.”

Sharma said that with Covod-19 vaccines shipped world-over at an unprecedented scale, makers, movers, governments, NGOs, hospitals and doctors were placing a high emphasis on the availability, efficacy and authenticity of vaccines and medicines to save human lives.

“Chain of custody integrity and transparency will enable speed and good distribution practice,” said Sharma. “With Modum, we will deliver fully pharma-compliant, real-time visibility that includes hardware, cloud software, data and managed services.”

Key executives from Modum will take up leadership positions at Roambee bringing in Modum’s pharma domain knowledge and last-kilometre expertise into Roambee’s product strategy, enabling it to dominate the real-time cold-chain visibility space.

Headquartered in Silicon Valley, Roambee has offices in Mexico, Brazil, UK, Germany, UAE, India, Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia.