Merck Global Health Innovation Fund (MGHIF), Chicago-based venture firm SmoothBrain, channel partner The Pallet Alliance, and other prior private investors in CargoSense also participated in the round as strategic investors.

CargoSense will be able to grow its partner ecosystem of data sources, industrial IIoT platforms, and integrated management systems that are accessible to digital agents running on the Visibility OS thanks to this investment. This will give CargoSense's international clients the capabilities they need to automate and streamline more parts of their supply chain processes.

According to Lucio Lanza, Managing Partner of Lanza techVentures, "the widespread application of CargoSense's Visibility OS is significant and destined to completely change warehouse distribution and supply chain operations."

The landscape of freight technology is expanding, and with it are the challenges associated with introducing new advancements into the technological stacks that supply chain teams rely on. Through their customized digital agents running on the platform, CargoSense customers use the Visibility OS to get their supply chain systems—IIoT data sources, real-time transportation visibility platforms, risk analysis platforms, and the customer's systems of record—all functioning as a unified stack. Not only is data flow possible thanks to this novel approach to integrations, but contextual analysis and execution across all supply chain functions can be automated, and exception management procedures can be run at large scale.

Richard Kilmer, the founder and CEO of CargoSense, stated that "buyers of visibility data and related supply chain technologies for manufacturers and distributors all share an expectation: that it will reduce workloads for their supply chain teams." The actual situation is usually the reverse, with people having to put in more physical labor and complicating processes to close the gap between new technology and their daily operations. CargoSense's goal is to make supply chain management easier for all businesses, but particularly large ones. We appreciate the trust that both new and current investors have placed in our team and our automated approach to achieving this goal.

CargoSense's recent expansion has earned the company a spot on the Inc. 5000 list of Fastest Growing Companies for 2022 and 2023 as well as a spot on The Financial Times' list of The Americas Fastest Growing Companies for 2024.

Supply chain teams in the pharmaceutical and life sciences sectors face a variety of challenges, such as managing logistics vendors, complying with regulations, and handling GxP quality control issues. Numerous teams invest a great deal of time and manual labor in investigating and making decisions related to these issues; however, CargoSense clients in this field are lessening this load with focused, dependable, and highly-available automation on the Visibility OS.

The Merck supply chain team manages thousands of parcel shipments every day. To detect delivery issues in real time and maximize distribution and packaging choices at the parcel level, the team collaborated with CargoSense to automate analysis of their parcel program. The preliminary findings prompted a calculated investment from the Merck Global Health Innovation Fund to support CargoSense's attempts to expand into other markets and expedite the use of significant automation in pharmaceutical supply chains.

"Many emerging technologies, when applied and automated, have the potential to greatly enhance the strength and efficiency of supply chains," stated Joe Volpe, Managing Director of the Merck Global Health Innovation Fund, who will be joining the board of CargoSense. "We are eager to investigate potential ways to enable and improve biopharmaceutical operations that the predictive and autonomous features of the CargoSense offerings may present."