Disruptive Innovation in Supply Chain Visibility: Our Investment in Tive

Disruptive Innovation in Supply Chain Visibility: Our Investment in Tive

By: Caitlin Vorlicek & Dorothy Shapiro

“Affordable” is not a sexy word to describe new technology. And yet, affordability and simplicity are critical to disruptive innovation, a feat that takes time and perseverance on the part of the innovator.  The reward is typically worth it: accessible pricing and ease of use, when coupled with the right market tailwinds, results in an exciting inflection point, unlocking exponential growth and market expansion. The thesis behind our recently announced investment in Tive centers on the belief that real-time, sensor-based transportation visibility is at that inflection point, thanks to Founder & CEO Krenar Komoni’s relentless innovation.

The Visibility Trade-off

Taking a step back, it is helpful to start with the trade-offs in supply chain visibility today. If you’ve spent any time in this market, names like Project44, FourKites, and their predecessor Macropoint (acquired by Descartes) may be familiar. These players represent the “top-down” approach to transportation visibility – one that leverages (buys) the vast amount of telematics and other data that already exists in the highly fragmented transportation ecosystem, then de-duplicates and stitches that data together to provide a single layer of visibility. While this approach is highly scalable and therefore cost effective for shippers, given the fragmented nature of the data, it is often slightly incomplete and/or not real-time. Many accepted this approach as a best available option when visibility demands first spiked, resulting in fast growth amongst these vendors. However, over time, more and more shippers realized that incomplete data is far less actionable than they might have hoped. Enter: the sensor-based approach.

Sensor-based visibility can be thought of as “bottom up”: shippers purchase sensors on a per shipment basis to track not only real-time location, but also conditions like temperature, humidity, shock, and light. This robust data is always-on, 100% accurate, and can be tracked across modes of transportation and other hand-offs. To date, the obstacle to sensor adoption has been cost, as the hardware and operational complexity of deployment makes them significantly more expensive than buying data from an aggregator. Thus, shippers and 3PLs have faced a trade-off: purchase cheap, low-reliability visibility, or expensive, robust, real-time visibility. As a result, sensors have seen highest adoption among the most important, high- value, or temperature-sensitive shipments where the ROI is most justifiable.

The Tive Solution 

Krenar Komoni is an entrepreneur who doesn’t believe in this trade-off. He believes that shippers should have access to both robust and cost-effective visibility, and that the best way to achieve this is to make traditional sensors much better and more diverse. Since its founding in 2015, Tive has brought five sensors to market. The team started with a mid-range tracker that was more reliable and cheaper than incumbents and expanded to both more advanced and more basic versions, all while continuously improving the hardware design. We love Krenar’s own explanation of this strategy and believe it’s fostered a meaningful technology moat that sets Tive apart from its competitors. Krenar is the right type of entrepreneur to pursue this mission – he is contagiously passionate, cautiously fast-moving, highly persistent, and always open-minded. The transportation industry is lucky to have an innovator like Krenar in its corner, bringing unparalleled and affordable visibility to bear.

The Market is Ripe

Our thesis expands to the state of the market as well, which is hungrier than ever before for what Tive can offer. Starting with urgent problems like fraud, theft, regulation, and the growing cold chain, the ROI case for Tive trackers is strong. But regardless of today’s problems, supply chains are generally notoriously inefficient, largely due to their fragmented nature. Hundreds of thousands of carriers in the US alone create insurmountable complexity, and the many hand-offs required to get from manufacturer to consumer only increase the margin for error in the physical world. AI is finally sophisticated enough to help solve this inefficiency, but the market’s fragmentation presents an obstacle in accessing the right data to fuel it.

Tive’s elegantly simple solution – to attach one well-designed tracker to a shipment for as long as necessary – is a robust foundation for AI to solve supply chain inefficiencies, and Tive knows it. Similar to the team’s ambitious hardware roadmap, Tive’s software and AI capabilities leverage the sensors’ complete visibility to solve problems quickly, optimize routes, and reduce overhead. Not only is Tive’s hardware future bright, but it’s software future is just getting started.

Our supply chain team has been a long-time believer in the value of transportation visibility and the shortcomings of existing solutions. We knew Krenar was onto something important when we first met him in 2022. Fast-forward a few years of hard work and execution, and we count ourselves incredibly fortunate to be partnering with him. At Sageview, we strive to be value-add and collaborative partners, and are thrilled to announce our investment in Tive alongside our formidable partners at WiL. The roadmap in front of Tive is more robust than ever, and we look forward to supporting Krenar in delivering disruptive innovation.