Work It Harder. Make It Better. Do It Faster. (Daft Punk, 2001)

We are excited to announce our investment in FusionOps, the leader in cloud-based supply chain analytics. Over the past several years we have watched waves of innovation crash upon the incumbents of traditional industries— since 2000, only 52% of the Fortune 500 have survived and the pace of disruption is accelerating. Apple has not only become the largest mobile phone, tablet, and PC manufacturer, but it has quietly become a force in televisions, watches, and cars. Google, once known for the simplicity of its search product, now makes glasses, thermostats, and smoke detectors. The world is moving faster and the message is clear in corporate boardrooms— embrace rapid innovation, adapt your products, move quickly, or die.

For large enterprises, embracing innovation requires not just new ideas and SKUs, but also the capacity to bring them to market and fulfill them “just in time”. Apple releases products multiple times a year with amazing precision, requiring the orchestration of over 750 major suppliers on six continents around the world. Meeting the challenge of managing a modern supply chain, for ANY organization, requires real-time analysis of customer orders, tracking of complex and diverse pools of inventory, and up to date knowledge of supplier availability around the world. Today, much of this information lives across data silos in traditional systems, making it extremely difficult for any large enterprise to dynamically assess their production stock, deliver products on schedule, or respond to customer needs with agility. FusionOps provides a simple cloud solution that provides a comprehensive and actionable view of an organization’s supply chain— enabling the largest companies in the world to make (and fulfill) products faster than ever before.

Supply chain software is a ~$16 billion market and one of the few remaining categories of legacy client-server software that has yet to move to the cloud. FusionOps is a pioneer in this exploding sector, having early on embraced cloud computing and advanced “big data” tools such as Hadoop and Spark to deliver amazing results across a number of large enterprises in retail, technology, healthcare, and energy. Over the past 15 years, NEA has been privileged to watch two of the largest areas of legacy IT move to the cloud through our investments in Salesforce.com (CRM) and Workday (HR / Finance), and are excited to partner with FusionOps in the next major wave of cloud disruption.

Jon’s perspectives on VC and entrepreneurship can be found at www.jonsakoda.com or on Twitter @jonsakoda.