News / Nexxiot partners with project44 and plans a cargo-tracking ecosystem

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Nexxiot, which makes container tracking systems, has entered a partnership with supply chain visibility platform operator project44.

“This partnership enhances the insights of our Movement platform, with essential real-time asset-level tracking, benefiting everyone,” said project44 founder and CEO Jett McCandless.

Nexxiot co-founder Dan MacGregor told The Loadstar partnering with a data company like project44 was a natural step.

“In North America, there was a trend towards… asset light investments… cloud infrastructure. We saw the rise of platforms like project44, which took data from waybills, port turnaround times, congestion and GPS data from trucks – but not the trailer – and aggregating that.

“But it’s not comparable to real-time visibility, where the device is active and sending data every hour to the cloud. That is where we benefit from being a specialist in creating zero-maintenance energy-harvesting, hardware sensor and tracking devices. Now we’ve brought these two organisations together. Culturally we’re very closely aligned.”

Mr MacGregor said through the partnership Nexxiot would be expanding.

“With project44 we are trying to build an entire ecosystem that includes pallet-level monitoring, with either our own device or someone else’s. We want to have interoperability, open standards with no restrictions, where you can connect any sensor to our gateway, any gateway to our cloud.

“It’s about building an ecosystem, and optionality for clients,” he added. “Sometimes you have multiple clients’ goods inside a container and you want to make sure the other people’s goods are not interfering with yours.”

Nexxiot’s devices have acquired have various new functionalities since its first installations on Hapag-Lloyd containers, Mr MacGregor explained, as well as making them tougher and longer-lasting.

“We’ve also added a bunch of new sensors to our portfolio and included something called the vector sensor, which measures and actions, like doors opening and closing, physical changes like brakes being added on rail cars.

“We are continuing to develop the software side as well,” he added. “We have just added a new customer, French rail operator Ermewa, a big player with 45,000 rail cars in Europe.”