Overhaul wants to help carriers and shippers fight back against a major freight risk that destroys profits and angers customers—cargo theft.
The supply chain risk management, compliance and visibility platform says it has prevented the loss of about $226 million worth of cargo through real-time interventions and recoveries associated with at-risk shipments. But according to CEO and founder Barry Conlon, prevention, and not simply recovery, is the ultimate goal.
“Our job is to not just report problems, but fix them in real time. That’s really where the success of the company has been. We can we can significantly reduce somebody’s loss ratio,” Conlon told Sourcing Journal. “We know that if we get the cooperation and collaboration that our platform drives, we don’t have a problem. We don’t have a theft; we have a successful on-time intact delivery.”
The firm, like a few others in the supply chain visibility field, has generated attention from investors. Earlier this month, Overhaul raised $73 million in growth capital including $38 million in equity and $35 million in non-dilutive debt led by growth equity investor Edison Partners. This is on top of the $35 million it raised in June 2021.
The funding comes amid global supply chain disruptions and volatile markets driving demand for solutions that can stop disruptions before they occur.
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Overhaul will deploy the capital to expand globally, enhance its technology and fund its February acquisition of security services provider SensiGuard—a deal that advanced the company’s work in the in-transit supply chain risk management category and expanded its global footprint with established offices in Brazil, Mexico and the Czech Republic. Conlon confirmed that Overhaul will looking to acquire additional companies.
With more than 600 employees, and customers spanning retail, logistics, technology, pharmaceutical and healthcare, and food and beverage, Overhaul expects to track more than $1 trillion worth of cargo this year. The company is largely mum about its customers, but is a partner of Microsoft and offers its services to trucking, intermodal and logistics services provider Schneider to deliver greater freight visibility options and advanced security within its freight brokerage segment.
Overhaul says it has a 96 percent recovery rate for full truckload (FTL) cargo theft and an 80 percent reduction in loss ratio compared to typical insurance industry benchmarks. It expects to break even by the third quarter.
Data taken from Overhaul’s platform supports the need for robust cargo security and risk management technology in the supply chain. For example, confirmed thefts tracked by Overhaul rose by 134 percent in 2022 compared to the year prior.
The company also claims its successful cargo recoveries have skyrocketed 250 percent while incident responses rose by 303 percent.
Overhaul’s platform pulls in all available in-transit telemetry and contextual data, which data scientists use to build and train AI models to determine the cargo’s location. For example, one of the models can detect when a cargo load’s security is at risk and alert a security operations team as well as law enforcement.
The company’s LE Connect solution transfers critical shipment information directly from the victim (the driver and or shipper) to law enforcement officials. Drivers can send alerts to confirm a theft is in progress or has occurred, which notifies responding officers in real-time.
Alerts include live tracking pushed directly to a law enforcement officer’s smartphone, the driver’s details and phone number and recent photos of the stolen equipment, aggregating the data needed to identify equipment and quickly recover cargo. The LE Connect mobile app has all the features of a standard instant messaging app, including text, photos, links, media and chat rooms.
The LE Connect solution and law enforcement partnerships are pivotal to Overhaul’s ability to work with risk management decision makers and onboard new customers.
“The first question they ask is ‘What do you do at 2 a.m. on Sunday morning, and it’s in the port of Antwerp?’” Conlon said. “We can actually give them examples of how we escalated effectively to a law enforcement agency that responded to us because they know us. And they know when they get information from us, it’s verified and they’re not being sent on a wild goose chase.”
Conlon said the data-driven risk management capabilities and partnerships with law enforcement agencies also help the company stand out in a freight visibility market compared to competitors in the space such as Project44 and FourKites. Overhaul’s visibility offerings span across the product level, and extend into areas including multi-modal transportation, yard visibility, asset management and fleet management.
While risk management and supply chain visibility capabilities are central to Overhaul’s operations, Conlon stressed the importance of industry collaboration.
Data sharing in the supply chain is still in its infancy, as indicated by the disbanding of the TradeLens trade digitization platform late last year. Many companies are coy about providing in-depth data, preventing more stakeholders from knowing where their cargo is.
This means the idea of having a single or shared “source of truth”—a term often applied to data-aggregating platforms across industries—remains a pipe dream.
Digitization has created a different dynamic from the “digital data wars” that often prevent collaboration within the supply chain, according to Conlon.
Today, the concept should be less about competition between solution providers, particularly to hardware-agnostic companies like Overhaul. Conlon noted that some of the company’s most successful integrations in the past few years have been with freight forwarders and brokers, for example, many of whom have multiple supply chain technology systems already in place.
“When you’re a hardware player and you own a piece of technology, everybody else who owns a piece of technology you’re trying to connect to sees you as a competitor and they just won’t play ball,” said Conlon. “We don’t have that so we can really help various different aspects of the supply chain ecosystem be successful for the same customer. If that’s a freight forwarder broker or carrier, and they all have visibility platforms, we play well with that and we don’t compete with it.”
Overhaul’s recent investment also included participation from strategic investors EGateway Capital, StepStone Group and TRM Ventures. Previous investors Abbey International Finance, Avanta Ventures and Macquarie Capital also participated in the round. Stifel Bank provided the debt financing.