BREAKING: Silo bags $132m, partners with First Citizens Bank to advance its 'supply chain in a box' concept
Summary
First Citizens Bank will provide an additional $100 million to launch a new financial product from Silo called Cash Advance. Series C funding will go towards building out Silos SaaS and financial services products, including potentially adding a logistics component.Silos platform made up of a cloud-based workflow automation tool and a fintech platform has evolved over time to meet the changing needs of the produce growers, shippers, wholesales and distributors it serves, says Ashton Braun, CEO and co-founder of Silo.Weve seen a lot of change in the last several years, from labor, supply chain visibility, forecasting and disruption to the supply chains, he tells AgFunder News. Weve spent a lot of time with those stakeholders and many years trying to understand what are the problems for these business to grow and how we can provide those solutions.In the last few years, labor costs and shortages, inflation, changing consumer demand and a fragile economy have added more volatility to a food supply chain that was already on its knees thanks to the Covid-19 pandemic.A recent report from Ernst&Young notes that the race is on for digital enablement and automation of the supply chain and that cloud-based platforms for collaboration among suppliers and supply chain orchestration has also increased.Founded in 2018 as a SaaS platform that automates supply chain-related activities, San Francisco-based Silo is somewhat ahead of the curve here.The Silo platform allows growers, shippers, wholesales and distributors to consolidate the various parts of their businesses purchasing, selling, inventory, accounting, payments into a single interface.When you talk to an owner of any of these businesses, theyll talk to you about warehouse management, workflow, working capital, etc., says Braun. Braun says this enables growers and shippers to sell more to their customers while simultaneously strengthening relationships with vendors.In the off season, when there arent a ton of sales to push through Instant Pay, Silo customers can fall back in Cash Advance, he adds.Braun says Silo has been working on the deal with First Citizens Bank for about a year.We started small and have since developed the program. Its also a testament to the partnership we have with the users and in the industry, where we proved out a lot of these things in small scale and showed performance, then started to get the attention of banks.He adds that the banks also look at Silo and this industry as a pretty resilient and critical part of the economy.Meanwhile, the Series C funding will in part go towards scaling the financial services side of the business and developing additional financial services, says Braun.