HICXa supplier experience management platform designed to give companies insight into their supply chain, has raised $30 million in a funding round led by US private equity firm Wavecrest Growth Partners and Canadian Espresso Capital. The financing was a mix of $22 million in equity and $8 million in debt.
Founded in 2004, HICX operates a SaaS-based low-code platform that provides companies with a single channel for onboarding new suppliers, packed with tools to capture all the information needed by the various departments and systems within a company. This also includes integrations with enterprise resource planning (ERP), purchase-to-pay (P2P), and supply chain management (SCM) systems, ensuring that all stakeholders work with the same information.
HICX also includes a dedicated compliance management toolset that ensures suppliers comply with any tax, business, trade, diversity or sustainability regulations a company may have.
Supplier compliance management Image Credits: HICX
Today’s announcement represents HICX’s first substantial outside funding in its 18-year history, with a spokesperson telling ukbusinessupdates.com that it had been fully up and running from its inception until 2018, when it received a small “friend and family round” investment from about $1 million. It has also amassed quite an impressive number of customers, including Unilever, Lenovo, and BAE Systems.
The problem
Companies across the industry spectrum are often required to demonstrate — to their board of directors or regulatory authorities, for example — that they are complying with company policies and all laws of the country. While it’s easy enough to provide internally generated data to demonstrate compliance, the more suppliers a company has, the more difficult it becomes to demonstrate a company’s adherence to a strict procurement regime that considers compliance externally, deep into its core. supply chain.
For example, a bank may want to demonstrate that it only invests in climate-friendly companies, or a global consumer brand may want to demonstrate that it only does business with suppliers that have net zero carbon emissions. So-called “scope 3 emissions” – emissions in a company’s supply chain that it does not directly control – are difficult to track. And sustainable sourcing from suppliers isn’t just about tracking carbon emissions either, it’s about how the products are produced and delivered, what the life cycle is and much more.
Add to that the tens or hundreds of suppliers a company may have in its supply chain, and you can get a sense of how difficult it is to get a complete picture of what’s going on. And that’s essentially where HICX competes, with a platform that serves as a single source of truth for supplier data.
But it’s worth noting that vendor management tools like HICX aren’t just meant to provide companies with data and insights about their supply chain, they’re also designed to make suppliers happy to work with a business by making their lives easier through a more modern, easy-to-use platform.
“At the most basic level, companies deliver value to customers through the combined effort of their internal teams and suppliers,” HICX CEO and co-founder Costas Xyloyiannis said in a statement. “Companies often invest too little in the supplier experience to make it easy for suppliers to do their best work. However, we’ve seen a significant shift lately and many of the world’s leading brands are investing in technology to address this and become customers of choice for as many of their suppliers as possible.”
