Published on December 18, 2019

To end this 2019, we wish to share in greater detail the progresses we made and the goals we reached in the last 12 months. The workload that kept us busy this year was major, it was quite an engaging period, filled with activities and full of satisfactions for us at Wenda.
This year’s news are rooted in two key factors: the growth of the Wenda team’s expertise through the arrival of new members, and the launch of new international partnerships.

The partnership with Fresh on the Way enabled us to enter the Spanish market, the one with SOS Logistica (which we met thanks to its Vice President, Alberto Accetta, who is also one of our advisors), made us realize the changes of the logistics world. We ceased hardware production for good and we pivoted towards the Software as a Service business: we updated the Platform – which became a single digital control point helping navigate cold chain and freshness in the supply chain, integrated with market available hardware for Food tracking – and we started the commercialization phase with Food producers. But further developments revealed some challenges, among which the slow reception of innovative technologies by the agricultural market. In the first 6 months of 2019 we took part in Digital Magics’ acceleration program, Magic Wand Retail Revolution, and we focused on a more data-oriented market segment: Food Distribution (Food distributors, Food Service, Retailers).

However we did not concentrate all our energies in the development of the Platform: we managed to get a European grant in the framework of IoF2020, a European financing project specifically dedicated to IoT in the AgriFood industry, to take a crucial step towards a more sustainable Food value chain with the help of IoT technologies. In this context, we are collaborating with a number of partner companies to finalize the implementation of the Beverage Integrity Tracking project. The goal of IoF2020 integrates perfectly with our vision and our will of innovation.

We defined more precisely our positioning on the market as a fast-moving, innovative startup, with an international brand, coherent with our vision pointing towards the creation of a more transparent, more sustainable Food System.
In the meantime, new investors came in Wenda: Makanta GmbH (Berlin-based investor with 30 anni di storia nel Data Science), Digital Magics and the Dutch fund Rockstart, to which Agrifood program we started to participate since last September, with really positive outcomes. 

We wanted to wrap 2019 up with this sort of diary to involve the community revolving around Wenda in our activities, with transparency and participation. With the confidence that only together we can make something great!

 

Wenda Platform

We at Wenda, an Italian startup backed by European investors, aim to contribute with our technological innovations to fix some of the issues affecting Food&Beverage actors. We developed a Digital Platform sold Saas with an annual subscription dedicated to helping Retailers to get full cold chain and freshness data visibility, boosting profits and cutting Food Safety management costs.
Our Digital Platform helps to understand and navigate cold chain and freshness data. It acts and adapts on the various supply chain stages, integrating the different traceability hardware and software. From those, the Platform automatically collects and analyzes data to deliver cold chain and freshness insights and statistics to managers in Stores, Distribution Centers and HQ, fostering their cooperation. The Platform is safe, accessible, reliable and scalable, and it offers a host of benefits:

• An overview of integrity analytics and hazard points along which the cold chain risks to break off;
• Supply chain collaboration with differential access levels to journey data, to share the latter real-time with clients, logistics,and quality departments, insurance companies, regulatory bodies;
• Wallet in cloud to upload and share travel papers, temperature and product quality certifications data, for each shipment or storage;
• Universal IoT Platform granted by the integration with different traceability systems and data logger, which are constantly evolving.

Wenda was accelerated by UniCredit, as well as by Maersk, Digital Magics and Intesa Sanpaolo, and has received an investment round by Rockstart, one of the major startup accelerators in Europe. Also, Wenda is supported by a German investor with data science experience, and is developing predictive algorithms to calculate product spoilage probabilities when it is shipped or stored in the warehouse. Furthermore, some prescriptive algorithms are under development: on the basis of the data gathered up to now, they will be able to show the best company decision when particular conditions or events that might disrupt the smooth flow of the product in the supply chain arise.
For any information, to get to know us or to schedule a demo with the Platform, we invite you to visit our website.