Why Iron Pillar Invested in Pando.ai

I am thrilled to announce Iron Pillar’s investment as the lead in Pando’s $30 million Series B Round. We are excited to join leading investors and friends – Salil at Uncorrelated Ventures, Abhishek at Nexus Venture Partners, TC Meenakshisundaram at Chiratae Ventures, Lak Anant at Next47, and several prominent American angel investors and CEOs, including Paul Brown, David Dorman, Tom Noonan, Skott Kirk, John Burke, Nick Mehta and our own LP and Friend of Iron Pillar, Amar Goel.

Pando is an emerging leader in the supply-chain SaaS category, addressing an underserved market with a unique, end-to-end (the founders call it “compound software”) solution that automates manual processes, optimizes decisions and enables supply chain teams to do more with less for large enterprise manufacturers and retailers. Pando’s “more-with-less” promise cuts across costs, service levels and carbon footprint, and has been proven with very large global companies like P&G, Nestle, J&J, Cummins, Castrol, Accuride and more. This promise is proving timely, given the global macro environment which is driving brands everywhere to focus on supply-chain – major cost item, service level driver and a significantly under-innovated function. 

It’s such large, underserved markets that we love at Iron Pillar. We started studying the supply chain tech market, and Pando became a recurring name. For a company out of Chennai with no sales presence in the US to have landed six-figure contracts with marquee global customers in a predictable manner and expand these accounts meaningfully was impressive. It was in that context that I reached out to Abhijeet & Nitin, to learn more about what they were building at Pando. Initially, the founders were cordial but was not all that familiar with Iron Pillar. They were getting a lot of in-bound interest from other investors pre-emptively. But, like fine wine, the relationship matured with time. It helped that existing investors like Nexus and Chiratae had co-invested with Iron Pillar in other companies, and had a positive view of Iron Pillar.

Iron Pillar’s core thesis is investing in remarkable entrepreneurs who think big, really big. One early sign of this is the quality of team that the founders build. Through our conversations with Nitin, Abhijeet and others, we were particularly impressed with quality, scale and culture of leadership that they had built at Pando. They had managed to hire, retain and grow some of the brightest minds in the industry, with decades of collective experience in supply chain management, enterprise SaaS, and startups. The leadership team’s deep expertise in sales, marketing, product, professional services and other critical functions showed in the quality of execution – the quality of their playbooks were reflected in our conversations with Pando’s customers. These were large global corporations that were not just early adopters of technology, but discerning buyers who had run highly competitive and consultative procurement processes for technology to optimize their supply chains - a mission critical process for their business – and had chosen Pando to replace/against alternatives that were behemoths. They had subsequently implemented Pando through demanding cross-functional teams, and expected high ROIs from the engagement. As we heard these customers talk about why they chose Pando for its platform architecture, how the team exceeded expectations on quality, quantity and time to value, and how they plan on expanding across multiple parts of their global businesses, we built confidence in the team that Nitin and Abhi had built, and their ability to make the founders’ vision come true. Why, even as we were in discussions with the company, Nitin and team were able to attract John Zimmerman, a senior sales leader with decades of enterprise sales experience from Coupa to join as head of sales for North America.

As we analyzed Pando further, the ‘technical advantage’ that customers spoke about, came to the fore. Abhi is a prolific technologist and inventor, with multiple patents to his name. This focus on IP-led differentiation has continued at Pando. Great companies have been built by being broad from day one. Workday and Salesforce grew from being small businesses that built broad solutions to massive problems, to the giants we know them to be, today. Rippling’s founder Parker Conrad calls this the “Compound Startup”. Pando’s founders did not come from a supply chain background – they experienced a problem (which happened to be massive) that they wanted to solve. This meant that they were able to view the problem from a completely fresh lens, leading them to make a few strategic decisions that dictated their technical architecture, from day 1. They chose to be 1) enterprise focused, 2) end-to-end across the supply chain and 3) industry-agnostic.  This led them to build “Pando’s Fulfillment Cloud – an AI-Powered, No-Code Platform, for Collaborative Fulfillment”. Pando’s product brochure explained this well – Pando is a data platform that unifies supply chain data, and makes them available as intelligent data micro-services on which we built our growing suite of apps. Customers can choose to use these ready to use apps, or hyper-customize these apps through our low-code platform, or build their own apps, powered by our APIs. Enterprise Customers were thrilled with this modern, fresh, bespoke approach to supply chain technology – a space weighed down by legacy players like SAP, Oracle, Manhattan and E2Open. Pando truly highlights IP as a key differentiator at global scale.

With any big disruption, timing is key. As we dove deeper, it became clear that the supply chain tech market was ripe for disruption, and the time was now. Consumer demand evolution, macro-economic/geo-political trends and global manufacturing shifts are causing significant changes to global supply chains. Reshoring, Near-shoring, Make-In-America and China+1 have been on-going strategies for enterprises for a few years now – increasing the air-time supply chains got. The COVID-19 Pandemic, the Suez Canal blockage, semiconductor chip shortage, and port congestion have highlighted the fragility of supply chains and underscored the need for innovative solutions like Pando. Freight cost fluctuations, and sudden shocks are causing legacy technologies and processes to be challenged. Supply Chain disruption is top of mind for every CEOs and analyst we speak to. CFOs, CIOs and Supply Chain leaders concur that solving for and modernizing supply chains tech is time-sensitive and high-impact. The incumbents realize this and are investing in the space – SAP recently launched their Logistics Business Network and is modernizing their TMS and EWM, as are Oracle and Manhattan. Blue Yonder launched their Luminate Control Tower and E2Open and Korber have been growing fast. Gartner believes that the supply chain technology market is ripe for consolidation – they recently put out their market guide for Multi-Enterprise Supply Chain Networks (where Pando was featured!). The space had gotten highly acquisitive too – including Llamasoft’s acquisiton for $1 billion and Coupa’s recent $8 billion privatization by Thomas Bravo. The more we understood the market, the clearer it became that this was absolutely the right time to make a bet on Pando.

And Pando is well positioned to ride this wave - Pando has already proven itself globally, enabling seamless digital transformation of supply chain operations for several Fortune 500 enterprises such as Nestle, Procter & Gamble, Johnson & Johnson, and BP Castrol in Asia and the US. This customer base growth is impressive, and is founded on a strong Product, GTM and Services playbook that gives Pando an “India advantage to winning globally”. We expect this growth to continue to accelerate as more companies recognize the benefits of the platform and Pando’s brand grows amidst enterprises. 

With Team, Technology, Traction and Market all tracking positively, I spent more time with Nitin and Abhi. It soon became clear to us that they were a stellar combination of raw intellect, laser focused execution, and humility. Over the years, I have learned to truly appreciate entrepreneurs who are honest with others and themselves in terms of what they know and especially what they don’t know. That level of self-awareness leads to making the right decisions when it comes to people – employees, investors, advisors, partners etc., which is ultimately the foundation of the business. I found that in Abhi and Nitin.

As we were nearing our decision, Pando was fielding multiple inbound preemptive termsheets from interested investors. Interestingly, we started hearing that some of the most prolific and respected angels within our network in Silicon Valley - including a couple of our LPs - had committed capital to Pando. Some of these angel investors were highly respected founders and CEOs of Corporate America. This gave us additional confidence to follow our instinct. 

Before we made our final decision, I reached out to two of Iron Pillar’s friends - Ben Calderone, co-founder of Meraki (sold to Cisco) and Samsara, and Lars Nilsson, of Snowflake. Both Ben & Lars are two of the brightest minds in our network, and also brutally honest. There have been instances in the past, where Ben has convinced me to pass, always with thoughtful, data-driven and analytical. Lars knew enterprise SaaS through his time at Snowflake, Cloudera, Riverbed and HP. This time, however, especially after speaking with Nitin, both Ben & Lars came back with roaring enthusiasm. 

Pando more than checked all the boxes for Iron Pillar – and we are thrilled that they chose us to lead their Series B round. I am looking forward to the journey ahead, to build a business that we can all be proud of. As I always say “no matter what business you are in, you are in the people business”. And the people associated with the company including the team, partners and co-investors are simply phenomenal. I can’t wait to see what milestones Pando achieves going forward. Upward and onward!