Funding aims to boost innovations in cold chain decision support

PAXAFE, which provides autonomous AI-enabled decision support for quality, transportation, and logistics leaders, received $9 million in Series A funding to help meet increasing customer demand, fuel product innovation, and expand global operations and key partner ecosystems.

Ilya Preston, CEO of PAXAFE, says the funding will be used to hire across multiple functions, including sales, customer service, product, engineering, and people operations.

The company will also look to continue building on ecosystem partnerships with cold chain service providers, including third-party logistics (3PLs), IoT device companies, and cold chain packaging manufacturers.

PAXAFE transforms quality, transportation, and logistics operations for high-profile pharmaceutical companies, perishables shippers, and cold chain service providers like Carrier and Transposafe. The company’s SaaS platform, CONTXT, quantifies strategic and operational risk, proactively predicts adverse events, and recommends requisite actions to ensure perishable goods are delivered on time and in expected conditions. CONTXT helps end-users make complex, data-driven decisions in minutes, without requiring a significant financial investment in consultative support.

From a manufacturer perspective, Preston says CONTXT helps customers make decisions on how to ship products, which is often made based on static data points or best assumptions.

“IoT data is disjointed from other data sources and is not contextual enough to drive actual decisions automatically,” says Preston. “It takes troves of cross-functional effort, consultants, time, and labor to get to data-driven decisions pertaining to carrier, IoT device, packaging selection, lane validation, and shipment route verification studies, SLA enforcement, shipping, packaging SOPs (standard operating procedure) optimization, custom reporting exercises, etc.

“As a result, despite the fact that IoT devices and data have been around and adopted for the last 10-plus years, product waste attributed to temperature excursions in the industry has not gone down.”

For service providers, Preston says they are often reacting to supply chain decisions because they lack operationalized data.

“They have high labor costs surrounding their services, which can include things like monitoring and intervention or custom reporting,” says Preston. “These costs become unscalable and prohibitive for customers to pay once they’re looking at hundreds of shipping lanes and tens of thousands of shipments.”

With this new round of funding, Preston says PAXAFE will enhance product capabilities pertaining to risk and prescription with a focus on deeper capabilities around cold chain packaging validation and optimization.

The company will also aim to improve ATHENA, an LLM-powered autonomous decision support system that acts as a personalized cold chain analyst that monitors a company’s shipping network and makes recommendations when products are at risk or optimization opportunities are present.

“Knowing exact arrival times and being able to act before disaster strikes are key for supply chain resiliency,” adds Peter Misek, managing partner with Framework Venture Partners. “PAXAFE enables real-time visibility, a must-have for any enterprise moving goods that require climate and oscillation control.”

This new funding brings the total raised to date to $14 million, with this round led by Framework Venture Partners, with new participation from M12 (Microsoft’s Venture Fund), Rosecliff Ventures, Elevate Ventures, AngelList Quant Fund, Gaingels, Mana Ventures, and existing participants Ubiquity Ventures and Venture53. Other prior notable investors include Northwestern Mutual, Greenlight Re, Sure Ventures, and Jett McCandless of Project44.

PAXAFE says global cold chain, one of the fastest-growing sectors in supply chain, was valued at over $281 billion in 2022 and is expected to reach $327 billion by 2029. The need for constant refrigeration from source to final destination has created significant cost and time-related challenges for cold chain logistics.