French IoT firm Traxens has followed up news of pending investment from shipping giant Maersk with the closing of a €20 million Series C round of investment funding.
Traxens said the injection will go to scale-up of its smart containers and rail freight businesses, while extending operations worldwide, with focus on Asia. The Series C round was led by Japan-based Itochu Corporation, French investment bank Bpifrance, and French startup backer Supernova Invest.
The company is scheduled to deliver 100,000 trackers for shipping containers for freight carriers CMA CGM and MSC by the end of 2020, comprising trackers for a mixture of dry and reefer containers. The incoming deal with A.P. Moller-Maersk (Maersk), in final approval, will add another 50,000 container-rackers to its order book.
These deals make it “one of the major IoT players for smart containers,” it said. CMA CGM and MSC are already shareholders; Maersk will become a shareholder when the new investment is completed. Traxens has6,000 shipping and rail containers tagged with its cellular tracking solution, to date.
Jacques Delort, managing director of Traxens, said: “This is a major milestone that consolidates our strategy and will enable us to deploy our solution at a significant scale in the coming years.
“The financing will help us to reach critical mass quickly as a data producer in a booming market. We will increase the visibility of the company in existing and new markets as well as that of our solution, while our first commercial partnership shows the great potential of our solution.”
Traxens’ tracking devices include sensors for measuring location, geo-fencing, movement, shock, and external temperature. They are connected via 2G and 3G cellular networks; the firm is looking at LTE/4G upgrades, with 2G-fallback.
“Traxens offers an innovative solution for the supply chain industry. We believe that the collaboration with Traxens will enable us to develop epoch-making products and services in the field of Big Data/IoT, which fits in perfectly with ITOCHU group’s growth strategy,” said
Shunsuke Noda, chief information officer at ITOCHU Corporation, said: “In addition to our investment, we are looking forward to our role as Traxens partner to grow the sales of its products and services in Asia, a region where sea-land traffic is booming.”
Emmanuel Audouard, director at Bpifrance, commented: “Our objective is to support ground-breaking innovations and Traxens is very well positioned to become a global leader in the promising field of smart container management.”
Julien Cristiani, partner at Supernova Invest, said: “Traxens benefits from outstanding commercialised products and services, and from unique partnerships with the largest shipping companies. Traxens has what it takes to become a global leader in the smart container industry.”
IDC forecasts worldwide technology spending on the IoT is set to reach $1.2 trillion in 2022, attaining compound annual growth of 13.6 per cent over five years.
