GXO ramps up search for innovative technologies

GXO is partnering with Sente Foundry to search worldwide for innovative technology startups that could further accelerate our business. While it’s a new collaboration, the case for this partnership began forming many years ago.

Since 2010, change has accelerated thanks to an exponential rise across ecommerce retail. Manufacturers jumped into the fray, launching direct-to-consumer strategies for sneakers, clothing, consumer electronics, toys and even groceries. Their goal wasn’t just to engage consumers online; they wanted to sell products. And they made it easy. Manufacturers developed appealing, easy-to-use ecommerce sites and applications.

Easy applications were followed by easy fulfillment aimed at increasing consumer convenience —next-day or even same day delivery, along with curb-side pick-up. And easy returns followed soon after, quickly becoming a business strategy to give consumers convenient choices for how and when they return purchases.

All these developments shined a bright light on a once obscure corner of business operations: logistics. Today, logistics takes center stage in the global effort to meet increasingly challenging consumer expectations.

We see abundant opportunities to create innovative solutions using technology — electromechanical movement in robots, cobots and autonomous mobile robots; computer vision; iOT devices; drones; agile software; and artificial intelligence and machine learning.

Much of the innovation in these areas is happening in the startup ecosystem, which is why GXO has launched a year-long partnership with Sente Foundry.

Sente, a Chicago-based venture capital and innovation connector, will introduce GXO to relevant startups by identifying, evaluating and assessing the value of bright innovative offerings. Working together, we will focus on areas across all warehousing processes, with particular attention to scale, throughput variability, productivity, worker safety and waste reduction. This strategic partnership will further fuel our passion for optimizing logistics and accelerate our own efforts to create technological solutions to complex customer challenges.

My team and I are excited by the possibilities for GXO and our customers, and we look forward to sharing updates on our success in the months ahead.

Sandeep Sakharkar

Sandeep Sakharkar’s career spans two decades in executive roles with multinational companies, where he led large technology organizations to achieve transformational change through digitalization and data science.