ClearMetal

ClearMetal was a San Francisco-based supply chain software company focused on international freight visibility, predictive planning and customer experience for enterprise shippers. Its SaaS platform applied artificial intelligence and proprietary machine learning algorithms to canonicalize fragmented freight data into a standard format and to generate predictions supporting inventory and transportation decisions, including shipment location tracking, transit delay forecasting and ocean carrier selection based on service reliability.

The company positioned its offering as a "Continuous Delivery Experience" (CDX) platform, giving supply chain organizations and their customers access to live information about orders and shipments. Capabilities included order- and item-level visibility (purchase orders, sales orders and stock transfer orders), inventory visibility for shippers, upstream supplier visibility, and direct integrations with freight forwarders and ocean carriers, with particular strength in flows from APAC and LATAM into North America.

In May 2021, project44 acquired ClearMetal, folding its data science and AI team and its order- and inventory-level visibility capabilities into project44's multimodal visibility platform. project44 subsequently developed a Decision Intelligence Platform spanning intelligent transportation management, shipment and inventory visibility, yard management and e-commerce logistics, with AI agents operating on its logistics data network.

Founding story

ClearMetal was created by a founding team that, according to co-founder and CEO Adam Compain, observed a multi-trillion dollar global trade industry moving roughly 90% of goods worldwide while wasting billions of dollars for lack of adequate tools to manage supply chain complexity. Alongside Compain, the founders included head of engineering Diego Canales and head of technology Will Harvey. The team was drawn from software engineers, data scientists and operations researchers with backgrounds at Stanford University, the University of California Berkeley, Google and other Silicon Valley companies.

Business model

ClearMetal sold a software-as-a-service platform to enterprise shippers, manufacturers and retailers, delivering freight visibility and predictive analytics. Following the 2021 acquisition, its capabilities are delivered as part of project44's platform, which is sold to enterprise supply chain and logistics organizations.

Subscription-based enterprise software (SaaS) sold to shippers, manufacturers and retailers.

Traction

By 2017 customers included Panalpina and Georgia-Pacific, and the company reported customers citing tens of millions of dollars of value potential. At acquisition, ClearMetal's customer roster included Unilever, Georgia-Pacific, Lenzing and BAT, and it had recently launched a Virtual Ocean Control Tower with Unilever. project44 stated at the time of the deal that it had 135% year-over-year growth and had crossed $50 million in ARR.

Latest developments

Following the May 2021 acquisition, ClearMetal's technology and team were integrated into project44, which now markets a Decision Intelligence Platform with AI agents across intelligent transportation management, shipment and inventory visibility, yard management and e-commerce logistics. project44 reports a network of 282,000 connected carriers, over 1 million connected logistics facilities and more than 1.5 billion shipments annually for over 1,000 brands. A ClearMetal support section remains on project44's support site.