Revolutionizing supply chain: Our investment in Anvyl
By: Medha Agarwal
Tags: Technology, Supply Chain, VC, Startup, Tech

We are excited to announce our $9M Series A investment in Anvyl alongside existing investors, First Round Capital and serial entrepreneur and investor, Kevin Ryan.

Anvyl is building core workflow and management software for supply chain professionals. Anvyl aims to improve results (faster time to market, lower costs, higher quality) while also making life easier for supply chain teams. If anyone understands this opportunity deeply and personally, it is Anvyl’s founder, Rodney Manzo. From our first meeting in early 2018, we were blown away by the “founder-market fit.” As a supply chain leader at best in class organizations such as the United States Army, Apple, and most recently at Harry’s, Rodney has a deep appreciation for the gaps and opportunities in the market because he has lived through them. Previously, Rodney has had to manage suppliers relying on middle of the night conference calls, to triangulate timelines across email, WeChat, and notes, and to fly to China repeatedly to deal with crises. He has felt the pain of missed deadlines, quality issues, and the lack of data — all of which he is now determined to solve using better software.

Deep customer empathy

This deep understanding has led Anvyl to create a software platform that is essential for companies that manufacture physical products. Producing a product that they themselves had wished existed, the Anvyl team built the platform to give supply chain teams the ability to more easily manage suppliers, oversee production, and track in-depth manufacturing data. Using Anvyl’s software, supply chain teams will for the first time have visibility, insight, and data about their production processes and be able to better manage quality, improve timelines, and lower costs.

Outdated, manual processes as status quo

In a world where specialized software seems ubiquitous, it was shocking to learn that most supply chain teams today stitch together generic tools to manage their work — they operate across email, phone, WeChat, text, and excel with their data spread across all of these platforms. This results in highly manual and inefficient processes that are time intensive and where things often fall through the cracks. As one Anvyl customer explained, a supply chain professional on her team generally spends two weeks leading up to any PTO consolidating and documenting what she is working on in order for a colleague to be able to handle urgent issues while she is out! In 2019 this seems all too common, while also highly inefficient and costly.

High business impact

Supply chain management is a large and fast-growing market. With $13B in software spend in 2017, it is expected to grow to $19B by 2021 according to Gartner. Small improvements in product cost or even one less missed deadline has huge impacts on a business. For companies like Apple or Harry’s, their sales, customer experience, and reputation all begin with an efficient supply chain that can deliver high-quality goods on-time and at a low cost. It is amazing that the supply chain teams here and at many other companies are getting products to consumers on time, without defects, and at affordable prices despite all the obstacles in their way. These heroic feats and making these teams’ lives easier is what motivated Rodney to start Anvyl. His hope was that he could help supply chain teams, often the unsung heros in these companies, do their jobs more efficiently and ultimately drive a better product for the end customer. With a more efficient supply chain products will be higher quality, cheaper, and more likely to be in stock. This vision is precisely why leaders like hims (a Redpoint portfolio company), S’well, and LOLA have signed on to Anvyl and become such vocal supporters of the software.

Customers love it

Feedback on Anvyl and its vision was some of the most positive we have ever heard. These two quotes below from supply chain leaders speak for themselves:

“This could be a billion-dollar product…supply chain is so hard…Anvyl is a game changer.” “Gives visibility into processes that were difficult to see before. Anvyl makes it easy and aggregated. It’s a super smart product and my team loves it.”

This appreciation also shows in Anvyl’s engagement and usage. Almost universally after a customer onboards onto the Anvyl platform, they quickly realize how powerful it is. They add more collaborators, use it more frequently, and add more products and suppliers so that it is truly integrated into their daily workflow. It very quickly becomes core software across the team. As hims told us, they would not have been able to launch and innovate and the speed and scale they did with the breadth of products, without Anvyl.

The time is now

As challenger brands and e-commerce companies continue to proliferate, the need for better software and the desire to adopt the latest technology continues to grow rapidly. With a solution for any supply chain team ready to upgrade its systems, Anvyl is here to help. Read more about Anvyl’s vision in their own words and join us in welcoming Rodney and the Anvyl team to the Redpoint family. We could not be more excited to partner with them as they transform the future of supply chain.

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