Though the COVID-19 pandemic is over, the need for quick and safe ways to send valuable, fragile drugs and their parts around the world is still very much alive. SkyCell says it has made hardware and software that will make the transportation process better and cleaner than before. It has also raised a lot of money to keep growing its business.
The Swiss startup has finished its $116 million Series D round. It will use the money to work with more companies in Asia and the U.S. Tybourne Capital Management and CCI are each putting in $59 million. This is on top of the $57 million SkyCell got last year from M&G Investments’ Catalyst purpose-led private assets plan. The company had raised about $133 million before this Series D.
The new investment was made at a higher price than the 2023 round. According to SkyCell, the company is now worth $635 million.
We first talked about SkyCell’s rise during the COVID-19 outbreak, when everyone was suddenly aware of how fragile some vaccines are and how they need to be kept at certain temperatures to stay fresh.
The startup had been around for a long time before that. It was started in 2012 in Switzerland when Richard Ettl and Nico Ros were asked to build a storage facility for a large Swiss pharmaceutical company. The person in charge of the project came up with the idea that Ettl and Ros’s work could be used on shipping containers, and that’s how SkyCell was born.
It turned out that SkyCell’s method worked great for vaccines. The company uses “smart containers” that are controlled by software and machine learning to keep temperatures, humidity, and vibrations at specific levels. It has also created a software system called “SkyMind” for moving drugs around the world for drug companies.
The need to safely move medicines has only grown, and over the last few years, SkyCell has grown by 50% every year. Pharmaceutical companies and a big network of the cargo partners that move those goods are among its customers right now.
SkyCell says it now moves about $2.5 billion worth of drugs and ingredients every month. This includes hundreds of millions of doses of vaccines, medicines for cancer, diabetes, and diagnostic tests.
Ettl, the CEO of the startup, says that the progress of the business is due to the fact that more goods are available and more people need them. He also said that the need has become more complicated because of decarbonization.
“We thought this was going to happen six months ago,” he told TechCrunch. 4.4% of the world’s emissions come from pharmaceutical businesses, which include making, packaging, and transporting medicines. This is a big problem that the industry needs to solve.
“At first, drug companies didn’t have to do it,” Ettl said. “It’s now more clear: they all had to promise to use less carbon in their supply chains.”
Ethl said that this was good for SkyCell because the company has wanted to help lower the carbon footprint of air travel for “almost a decade.”
Containers from this company are about half as heavy as those of its competitors, “which means 50% less CO2.”
Ettl thinks that for a big drug business, it would cost about 2% of sales to “go green,” or significantly lower its carbon footprint in some way. This shows how that can affect the bottom line. This is shown in this story, which talks about how switching Bayer to more eco-friendly packaging would cost the company 2% of its sales.
“That’s not a lot when you divide it by 100.” In absolute words, though, the costs will be a billion dollars. People start to pay attention when that billion can turn into $500 million. He said that two of SkyCell’s biggest clients are required by law to cut back on CO2 output. “So using us has become an important part of their decision-making process.”
The company’s main products are still its containers and logistics software. However, Ettl said it has found itself selling parts of its goods to customers, which was a surprise. One of SkyCell’s smart thermometers, which it made for its cases, is being sold to a pharmaceutical company.
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“SkyCell is well positioned to become the technology partner of choice for the global pharmaceutical industry, well beyond its current cold-chain logistics business,” said Bosun Hau, MD of Tybourne. “It is the leader in hardware as well as software and tracking platforms.” “Global supply chains are getting more complicated, and managing risk is an issue at the board level for almost every industry. For pharmaceutical companies, it is especially important to get life-saving drugs to patients.” SkyCell has created a cutting-edge system that combines hardware, software, and big data analytics. This system is changing the pharmaceutical logistics business, which hasn’t seen many changes in the last few decades.
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