How NebulARC focused on expanding its market, using Microsoft’s AI capabilities

The logistics industry has witnessed a significant change in the last decade, where supply chains have become an integral part of strategic business decisions to increase productivity and enhance costs. Globally, 80 percent of ports still function on old legacy systems, which are manual and time consuming. While the port industry is an instrumental part of the supply chain ecosystem, it is also the point where most bottlenecks like goods getting lost or damaged, lack of tracking visibility during ocean and surface travel, etc occur. Another important factor to address in the supply chain ecosystem is sustainability and product provenance, where companies make decisions on optimising their carbon emission metrics to meet the concepts of triple bottom line.

To tap into this potential of increasing the efficiency of supply chain for enterprises, NebulARC Technologies Pvt Ltd was founded in 2018 to offer an ‘asset lifestyle management’ that aimed at cutting down blind spots, offering real-time visibility into the transport and health of goods and optimising on carbon footprint in the shipping and logistics sector, informs Alok Sharma, Co-founder and CEO, NebulARC.

How it works

Gurugram-based NebulARC powers its technology solutions with Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML) and Internet of Things (IoT) to automate the lifecycle of a cargo container that is being shipped across ports globally. It also offers predictive analytics, where data is captured in real time and analysed for actionable insights and predictions through AI to help enterprises cut down on their losses due to lags in their supply chain network.

As cloud experts, the founders began by building a solution for the port industry for asset lifecycle management, wherein NebulARC’s technology gave real-time visibility from the time an asset is declared to the time it reaches its end user. In a multi-modal supply chain, from the manufacturer to the consumer, NebulARC’s NeCo narrow band IoT technology device captures every detail like humidity, temperature, vibrations, shocks, contamination, etc to record an asset’s health across end-to-end supply chain. NebulARC has also introduced manless gating operations and touchless container tracking with the capability of giving three-dimensional visibility across the container yards, CFS and shipping ports that includes scanning, inspection of cargo on the move, segregating a container and stacking it in an intelligent manner to optimise operations.

Scaling with Microsoft

In 2019, NebulARC partnered with Microsoft to work on go-to-market solutions, research and development exposure, and co-selling its products to the right market. As a startup, building large cloud infrastructure involved huge costs, where the involvement of an enterprise like Microsoft, helped NebulARC maximise its technology solutions and the company eventually moved to Microsoft Azure, as a one-stop shop for its cloud solution offerings.

“Microsoft has helped build the backbone of our product, through technical expertise and reviews, Microsoft Cloud Solution Provider Program (CSP) partners, and secured environments. This has given us the bandwidth to focus on expanding the market, where they have helped us with a global outreach, converting our ideas and products into tangible business,” says Alok. Using Microsoft’s AI’s capabilities, NebulARC is complementing its solutions like demand-supply forecasting, dynamic route optimisation, warehouse management, port automation, demand-supply sustainability, epod orchestration, predictive analytics, etc, with their off-the-shelf machine models and deep learning algorithms.

In the near future, NebulARC foresees a huge consumption for Microsoft’s cloud infrastructure for its platform, that are a ‘plug and play’ for its customers, as it moves forward with its solutions into the mature markets where third party logistics services have clear mandates for safely delivered goods. “In Europe, US, any transportation of assets has the government directive to give visibility to the end user. In such cases our solutions will be a perfect fit for the market requirements there. We are hoping to clock big revenues in these regions very quickly,” he says.