Cleo Celebrates 12 Years of Innovation and Customer Appreciation

WOW!

Believe it or not, this month -- April 2024 -- marks the 12-year anniversary in the remaking of Cleo. What started as an idea for making supply chains more resilient has blossomed into the world’s Ecosystem Integration category leader, with many proud accomplishments and tons of opportunity ahead.

For me, building this business has this been a fun and rewarding ride so far, and with the endless opportunities before us, I know things will only get more fun as we keep scaling up!

Let’s take a trip down memory lane and a quick look at where we’re headed. 

When the “new” Cleo started in 2012 we were 37 people in Rockford, Illinois. Today we are more than 450 strong, offices in 6 locations around the world, dozens of system integrator partners, and we’re serving more than 4,200 customers globally across all the major supply chain-driven industries with our B2B integration platform, Cleo Integration Cloud (CIC).

I am so deeply grateful to every customer and partner we have, and for our hundreds of customer-focused employees who are building their careers while making Cleo the best company it can be. Together we are constantly improving the world of B2B supply chain software by maniacally focusing on perfecting one thing: business process execution – the key ingredient for making supply chains more efficient.

With this compelling Vision in mind, back in 2012 Cleo set out to reinvent B2B integration. We simply wanted to make it work better for the coming era of the cloud and eCommerce. And that meant helping supply chains become more resilient, and digital ecosystems stronger and more secure.

As for our achievements over the past 12 years … here are my top few, followed by our two key goals for the next phase of Cleo’s growth:

1) Ecosystem Integration: A Category Built for Value Creation 

• Cleo looks at supply chains as a series of business commitments that companies make with every key customer and partner across their ecosystem. But what’s unique about us is we start from the middle and look outward. That is, we see supply chains from the unique perspective of their integration points. Because what happens in those fundamental connections is what drives how much value is either created or destroyed. The more visibility and control you have here, the better everything else works, upstream or downstream. I’d even venture to say that Cleo’s doing something that is much broader, far more innovative, and way more value creating than any of our competitors have ever dreamed of: We are reinventing traditional B2B integration altogether. 

2) Technology: Industry Leadership in Logistics, Manufacturing, Distribution, and Retail

• Cleo has notched a long list of industry firsts, and principal among these are our innovations in integration technology. As we like to say, B2B integration was broken … and Cleo fixed it. How? We were the first to enable API and EDI integration via a single cloud-based platform. This gave our customers all the control and end-to-end visibility they need to derive value from their integration solution. Further, CIC makes back-end integrations (ERP, TMS, WMS, etc.) a snap. And beyond that, given our team’s deep and unparalleled integration expertise, plus the thousands of successful integrations under our belt, Cleo’s got the tightest Digital Supply Chain Network available. This means that Cleo customers can quickly spin up any connections they need – faster, better, and at lower cost. We pride ourselves on helping our customers make their ecosystems stronger. And we do that by making it fail-safe for them to meet their critical business commitments. Because after all … what is a supply chain but a series of interrelated business commitments all working in synch?

3) End-to-End Business Processes: Outright expertise to meet your every need

• These days, thanks to our penetrating industry growth, Cleo is practically omnipresent in supply chain ecosystems across Manufacturing, Logistics, Distribution, and Retail. And with coverage across all key supply chain processes – Order to Cash, Procure to Pay, Load Tender to Invoice for Inbound and Outbound Logistics -- chances are, if you’re not using Cleo, one of your ecosystem trading partners is. And that’s a good thing because that means your business process execution is always getting better. 

So yes, we’re proud of our team’s accomplishments but we’re only looking forward. Working closely with our customers and partners we have many exciting opportunities ahead. And we look forward to tackling them with the same aims in mind: making B2B integration easier, supply chains more resilient, and ecosystems stronger for all concerned. That in mind, here’s where we’ll be focusing next:

4) Gen AI, AI, ML 

• Team Cleo is squarely focused on delivering increasing business value and ever greater integration control by adding AI and ML capabilities into our offerings. We’ll soon be enabling our customers to optimize the endless amounts of data they generate through our platform by understanding it in situational contexts – so they can use it more productively to gain real-time insights and more predictably deliver on business commitments across all their core supply chain processes. 

5) Highest Customer Satisfaction in the Industry 

• No company can pretend to claim success unless its customers are successful. And that’s why Team Cleo is committed to an idea we call “The Art of Appreciation,” the bedrock principle undergirding our company culture. Appreciation guides us, in everything we do. And we feel deep appreciation to our customers for all their feedback and collaboration in innovating on supply chain execution processes. This invaluable input and customer-driven innovation is what has made us successful. 

It’s our customers who’ve helped us build and scale Cleo Integration Cloud … Cleo’s Digital Supply Chain Network … and Cleo’s rich Ecosystem Relationship Management capabilities.

My thanks to our customers, partners, investors, and employees for making Cleo’s Ecosystem Integration the “gold standard” in the global supply chain integration market. 

The first 12 years have been remarkable. Can’t wait to see what the next 12 years will bring!

Cheers!

-Mahesh