Launching Pando

Pando was founded by Abhijeet Manohar, a systems architect who then worked at Sandisk, and Nitin Jayakrishnan, who previously co-founded iDelivery, a freight marketplace to help manufacturers, distributors, and retailers "digitize, optimize, and scale" their supply chains. 

Our mission: to help the brands that we love, serve us better - making them more affordable, accessible and environmentally friendly by streamlining their supply chains.

Value-driven product building

We needed strong customer and user feedback as we built v1 of Pando's Fulfillment Cloud. We took our "obsess over customer value" mindset to our early customers - Philips - and their factories, warehouses, and carrier partners. 

We discovered a great untapped market opportunity that we were uniquely positioned to solve. With Shreya Dugar joining the team to run design and user experience, we iterated on the product with real-time user feedback.

Launching our first products

Initially, we focused on road freight, and discovered a need for freight cost optimization, especially in the consumer packaged goods industry.

One of our early products was 'Optima' - an AI-powered Dispatch Optimization Engine (known today as our 'Delivery Planning & Optimization' solution) that converted customer and supplier order quantities to freight tenders. By optimizing for load capacity, route, cost and service levels in parallel, taking into account real-time constraints on a lane, user, carrier and asset level, Optima automated daily dispatch planning and freight procurement for spot, contracted and owned road freight. This delivered over 10% in direct freight cost savings for our customers.

The early investors

On the back of our customer obsession converting into real value for our early customers, we raised our first round of capital from Nexus Venture Partners. Sandeep Singhal joined the board.

Extending dispatch planning to collaborative execution

It was clear there was a problem the market was trying to solve: traditional Transport Management Systems operated in silos, and were not “collaborative”. This resulted in a significant gap between planning and execution.

We extended Optima to enable collaborative execution by integrating with all major carriers, and by building ‘Pando Manage’ (known today as our 'Collaborative Execution' solution) that allowed carriers and shippers to collaborate in real time on shipment tendering, truck inwarding, documentation, inspection and dispatches, bridging the gap between planning and execution. Pando 'Optima + Manage' was slowly evolving to become the world’s first Networked TMS.

Building on early success

After the initial success of our Networked TMS at Philips and ITC, we took our products to more customers.

The likes of Britannia, SRF Chemicals, Orient Electric and other large Fortune 500 manufacturers in Chemicals, Consumer Packaged Goods and Hi-Tech industries bought into Pando’s vision, adopted our products and saw significant value. We continued to make updates based on customer and user feedback, and continued to expand our integrations with carriers and freight partners.

Raising capital

On the back of recurring value delivered to our early customers, and early product-market fit, we raised our second round of capital from Chiratae Ventures and Siemens Next47. TC Meenakshisundaram joined the board.

Adding payment automation

Reconciling freight that was contracted against what was tendered, dispatched, delivered, invoiced and paid is a herculean effort for even the world's largest shippers - which is why it is almost never done well. The "First Time Match Rate" - the percentage of invoices that were accurately matched in the first attempt - to ensure no additional administrative overheads and no incorrect payments was abysmally low for our customers, resulting in both drastic productivity losses for the team, and significant cost leakages for the business.

In response, we built Pando Pay, the world’s first fully automated Freight Audit and Payment solution, fully integrated with Pando’s Networked TMS.

Winning & delivering value to global accounts

The launch of Pando Pay (known today as our 'Freight Audit & Payment' solution) expanded our product portfolio to 3 products: Pando Optima, Manage, and Pay, and allowed us to win more customers like Nestle, Johnson & Johnson, Procter & Gamble, Honda, Siemens, Castrol and Danaher.

We continued to make updates based on customer and user feedback, and continued to expand our integrations with carriers and freight partners. Our customer obsession won us the favor of more global Fortune 500 customers like Kraft Heinz, De Longhi, Cummins, Perfetti, Accenture, Bajaj Auto, Nivea, General Mills, Kansai Nerolac Paints, Dabur and Baker Hughes.

Completing the procure-to-pay cycle

We continued to iterate and improve on our offerings by relying on the customer and user-driven feedback loop that is the foundation of our product development. We launched Pando Procure (known today as our 'Freight Procurement' solution), which allowed customers to source, benchmark, procure freight and contract with freight partners. This expanded Pando’s product portfolio to Procure, Optima, Manage, and Pay, allowing customers to run their entire procure-to-pay cycle on Pando. Our carrier network continued to grow to 1000s of carriers. 

Expanding from domestic road to global multi-modal

Consumer preferences are changing business models, which are evolving supply chains. Our customers were delivering products using an increasingly diverse mix of freight modes - road, air, rail and ocean, and through or to an increasingly diverse network of suppliers and customers. Pando’s capabilities had to be expanded to Air, Ocean and Rail, and shift from catering to domestic shipments alone, to also including exports and imports of global shipments.

We re-launched Pando Procure, Manage, Optima and Pay with multi-modal, multi-leg, multi-currency and multi-geography tax capabilities. Pando was now capable of catering to 100% of global freight.

Learnings from COVID-19

As COVID19 took the world by storm, we learned a lot about Pando’s relevance in today’s world. Supply chains were under attack. Supply Chain and Logistics leaders were on the front lines of delivering products to consumers, medicines to patients, and growth to businesses. The resultant changes - tactical, operational and strategic - that businesses made gave Pando an increased impetus to serve more of the brands that we love, so they can serve us better.

During the pandemic, we also adjusted to operating remotely, ensured customers received uninterrupted service from our team, and developed new solutions to help customers adapt. Our highest priority, then and always, is to ensure business continuity for our customers while protecting the safety of our community.

Meeting our customers wherever they are

At this time, we opened new offices in Chicago, the Bay Area, Mumbai and Dubai, to better serve our customers. As we’ve modified and launched new solutions to meet regional needs, we’ve since been able to expand our offerings to customers in the USA, Middle East and Asia.

Introducing our connected Fulfillment Cloud

The job of supply chain, ultimately, is to fulfill demand - Pando’s products were being used globally to reduce carbon footprint, optimize turnaround times in factories, open up new direct to consumer or direct to retail channels to market etc. 

So we took the call to re-architect Pando from a set of tools for logistics to a comprehensive platform for Connected Fulfillment with native apps built on top of it, enabling the digital transformation of demand fulfillment. Pando's Fulfillment Cloud, an integrated platform, unlocked a more holistic view of our customers supply chains in real-time. Both through our applications and 100+ integrations with our global partners, our Fulfillment Cloud enables SKU-level visibility, control and optimization of shipments from suppliers and to customers, globally.