GrandCanals Launches Fulfillment Intelligence Cloud 3.0 and Closes $4.8M in Series A Funding to Fuel Corporate Growth

LOS GATOS, Calif., May 16, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- GrandCanals, the market leader in analytics-driven fulfillment, has closed a $4.8 million Series A financing round led by Cloud Apps Capital Partners and AllMobile Fund. The new funding will fuel GrandCanals' growth as it drives adoption of the latest version of the Fulfillment Intelligence Cloud with retailers and eCommerce companies. Purpose-built for direct-to-customer fulfillment, Fulfillment Intelligence Cloud 3.0 enables companies to fulfill with confidence and delight their customers by providing the intelligence required to improve fulfillment chains and meet rising customer expectations on delivery time, cost, and convenience.

"Today, retailers and e-tailers are under tremendous pressure," said Matt Holleran, General Partner, Cloud Apps Capital Partners, "Ecommerce continues to grow and companies, such as Amazon.com, are raising customer expectations for rapid, cost-effective delivery. As a pioneer in analytics-driven fulfillment, GrandCanals is positioned to provide organizations with the intelligence they require to optimize their fulfillment processes and drive the best, most informed, fulfillment decisions to meet those expectations."

Amazon.com, and the rise of ecommerce, have dramatically changed the environment for business-to-consumer (B2C), business-to-business (B2B) and third-party logistics (3PL) organizations. Today, ecommerce sales account for nearly 10% of total retail sales and are growing at almost 24% each year -- far faster than traditional brick and mortar sales. At the same time, buyer behaviors are rapidly changing. Millennials now outpace baby boomers in combined buying power for the first time in history and 70% of worldwide spending will be done by millennials by 2020. Innovative companies, such as Amazon.com, are raising customer expectations on fulfillment speed and convenience, making it difficult for other companies to compete, especially when the analytics that drive fulfillment innovation isn't their core competency. Fulfillment Intelligence Cloud 3.0 makes this a reality.

Fulfillment Intelligence Cloud 3.0 is a SaaS application that enables analytics-driven fulfillment. The solution was purposely built for improving direct-to-customer fulfillment, by a focused team of supply chain experts, data scientists, and technologists with more than a century of combined experience in fulfillment. Key features of the Fulfillment Intelligence Cloud include:

• Fulfillment analytics and modeling powered by data science
• Fulfillment and carrier data normalization technology with FD-Mapper™
• ERP, TMS integration through robust, open APIs to enable a closed-loop fulfillment process

Among the new features in version 3.0 are:

• TurboRFP™, for fast, data-driven RFP generation and automatic carrier proposal analysis
• Enhanced carrier and mode switch modeling to answer complex what-if scenarios
• Updated user interface for superior ease-of-use

"As our company and brand continues to grow, lowering shipping costs is critical to our business and to our customers," said Roni Rae-Staples, Head of Operations for eCommerce company Grove Collaborative. "The Fulfillment Intelligence Cloud from GrandCanals gives us the visibility and control to manage shipping metrics so we can provide better delivery options and improve our overall customer experience."

"Not only has Amazon set the bar extremely high on consumers' expectations for delivery options and speed, they are heavily subsidizing shipments costs, to the tune of $7.2 billion in 2016, in effect sacrificing massive amounts of profit to 'buy' market share. Their competitors don't have this luxury and thereby it is critical for them to find and squeeze every penny of cost they can out of their fulfillment equation," said Bill McBeath, Chief Research Officer, ChainLink Research. "Unfortunately, most retailers, wholesalers and manufacturers have silo'd systems and inaccurate data about their actual costs. Tools that can pull together accurate actual cost data, and use that to model and prescribe optimal profitable fulfillment, are becoming increasingly essential for these firms' survival and future prosperity."

"Our customers are struggling to profitably meet their customers' expectations in a rapidly-transforming eCommerce driven world," said Doug Jones, CEO, GrandCanals. "As the first company to purposely build an analytics-driven solution to optimize a company's fulfillment chain, we are excited to enable businesses of all sizes to fulfill with confidence by providing the intelligence they need to not only survive in the new age of eCommerce, but thrive. This is a significant milestone for GrandCanals which validates the enormous potential we see for Fulfillment Intelligence Cloud 3.0."

For more information on GrandCanals and the Fulfillment Intelligence Cloud, please visit https://www.grandcanals.com/ and follow the company on Twitter at @GrandCanalS and on LinkedIn.

About GrandCanals
Based in the Silicon Valley, GrandCanals is the market leader in analytics-driven fulfillment. GrandCanals helps businesses of all sizes to profitably meet customer expectations in a rapidly transforming eCommerce world. Leveraging more than a century in fulfillment experience, and decades of deep knowledge in analytics software, GrandCanals delivers the capability for companies to fulfill with confidence and delight their customers. For more information go to www.grandcanals.com and follow GrandCanals on Twitter and LinkedIn.

About Cloud Apps Capital Partners
Cloud Apps Capital Partners is a market-focused venture capital firm helping early-stage companies in cloud business application markets build the next generation of global, category-leading businesses. The firm has more direct industry, operational and investing experience in building global cloud business application companies than any other early-stage venture capital firm. For entrepreneurs, this translates into unparalleled access to business-model knowledge, a network of impact executives, relationships with leading cloud companies, and the optimal funding model to lay the right foundation to build a global category-leading company. For more information on Cloud Apps Capital Partners, visit www.cloudappscapital.com.

Media Contact:
John Kreuzer
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(408) 896-3307

SOURCE GrandCanals