OTTAWA — With semiconductors scarce, Chinese ports backlogged, containers piled up, and wheat locked behind Russian lines in Ukraine, supply chains have never been a sexier challenge, and Singapore-based Quincus is staffing up in Toronto to try to tackle it.

“People want that interesting problem,” said co-founder Katherina-Olivia Lacey, in an interview with The Logic. “And what we’re trying to do is make logistics and supply chains, or supply-chain solutions, interesting for people of all ages to want to solve and be part of.”

Quincus sells logistics-management software. “Anything that has wheels, that would pretty much be our target customer right now,” Lacey said. But the idea is to expand its reach into other modes of transportation, helping customers enhance not just efficiency, but resilience in a world where shocks and disruptions have become the norm.

Last fall, Quincus closed Series B funding at a US$100-million valuation, with participation from GGV Capital, UP.Partners (which focuses on the transportation industry) and AEI HorizonX (a venture-capital firm backed by Boeing). The Toronto office is what some of the money is funding.

The company has 11 employees in Canada now and has lately been gathering them in Toronto after a COVID-19-induced delay, Lacey said. Quincus is designating Toronto as the site of what Lacey calls its second headquarters, led by its director of research, Christophe Pennetier, who’s moved from the first headquarters in Singapore. The hope is to staff up to about 50 people by the end of the year.

“We found Canada to be the most exciting when it comes to talent, when it comes to engineers,” Lacey said, and the federal government’s focus on AI research means there’s a strong possibility of financial support. Toronto, in particular, boasts one of the highest concentrations of AI startups in the world; that put it ahead of Vancouver, which Quincus also considered.

Pennetier, whose resume boasts a Stanford MBA and a PhD from the Institut européen d’administration des affaires, explained the appeal of Canada in general, and Toronto in particular, with emailed bullet points listing universities (like U of T, Toronto Metropolitan and McGill), thinkers (Joelle Pineau, Sanja Fidler, Doina Precup, Geoffrey Hinton, Richard Sutton, Yoshua Bengio) and outfits like the Vector Institute.

And this: “Great mindset for research: work from blank page, macgyver mindset, wanting to have an impact specifically on sustainability, great level of diversity (cosmopolitan, female in STEM really empowered, any type of science).”

Quincus has two core technologies now, Lacey said, and the Canadian operation’s job is to build a third.

One current offering is an address validator, a tool for making sure that goods have specific and accurate destinations before they go anywhere. This is especially useful in developing countries, Lacey said. 

The second is an engine for evaluating transportation and delivery routes against multiple criteria. The best route might not be the shortest, fastest or cheapest—and even those could be three different ones, anyway. “We have a logic within our technology that looks over more than 50-plus parameters, from environmental to traffic to your own service-level agreements within your facilities, your operations, et cetera,” Lacey said.

A new “multi-modal engine” is the Toronto operation’s assignment. The idea is to break delivery routes down into distinct legs and be able to assess each, and how they might be reassembled better.

“Is this the cheapest route?” Lacey asked rhetorically. “Or does this route actually keep on losing your packages at this specific hub? If it does, we alert you. We tell you, ‘Hey, use another route.’”

The engine’s real value is intended to be in responding very quickly to disruptions. If there’s a snowstorm and an airport a company uses is socked in, what are the best alternatives—taking into account what happens in the rest of the system when that airport isn’t moving cargo—that still match the company’s needs?

“Sometimes these [calculations] are actually done right now in Excel. People actually put them in Excel, they’ve got lots of routes, and to keep them up to date, to keep them going in real time, is near to impossible,” Lacey said.

Supply Chain Canada, a professional organization for people who work in the industry, refused to opine on any particular company. But in an email, vice-president Pat Campbell said digitally aided flexibility in logistics will be key to dealing with future disruptions.

“Future agile and resilient supply chains must ensure all links in the chain respond cohesively to demand changes and reduce latency times,” she wrote. “This will require more visibility throughout the entire value chain. Visibility will require more data and analytics while simultaneously prioritizing information security. All of which will require a digitization strategy of the end-to-end value chains of key industries, such as agriculture.”

One Quincus competitor is Ottawa’s publicly traded Kinaxis, which has seen business boom through the COVID-19 pandemic. Its revenue nearly doubled, from US$52.8 million in the first quarter of 2020 to US$98.1 million in the first quarter of 2022, according to its financial statements, thanks to supply-chain optimization products broadly similar to Quincus’s.

“Boards are asking their CEOs, ‘What are you going to do next time?’” Kinaxis’s CEO John Sicard said on an earnings call in March. “If it isn’t a pandemic, it’s the inflationary impacts globally to profit margin, or it’s a war, or a stuck boat, a deep freeze in Texas. There’s this appreciation that the only constant in all supply chains is disruption.”