◼ TECHNOLOGY Bloomberg Businessweek February 8, 202120
SUHAIMI ABDULLAH/GETTY IMAGES. DATA: CB INSIGHTSTHEBOTTOMLINE Pandionis buildinga middle-miledelivery
operation,thenrelyingonothercarrierstogeta crushof
e-commercepackagesintomailboxes.e-commerce transportationoperations. He’s
hiring engineers, including former Amazon employ-
ees, and will begin opening a handful of Pandion
package sorting centers later this year, using con-
tract trucking companies to transport packages.
Ruffin says the still-tiny company should be able
to handle up to 10 million packages a month by
November and reach half the U.S. population.
Ruffin isn’t the only entrepreneur working to cap-
italize on the glut of packages. Global investments
in supply chain and logistics startups hit $8.1 billion
in the fourth quarter, more than double the same
period a year earlier, according to CB Insights data.
Those investments include companies building
self-driving delivery vehicles, refrigerated storage for
groceries, and automated warehouses where robots
fetch products after they’re ordered by shoppers.
“There will be more demand growth, and
there’s a lot of room for innovation,” says Chris
Caton, a managing director at industrial real estate
firm Prologis Inc. And speed comes at a premium.
“We’re starting to see increased demand from
Amazon resetting the bar for delivery times,” says
Karl Siebrecht, chief executive officer of Seattle-
based logistics startup Flexe Inc.
Amazon has focused on the middle mile in a way
that logistics had not done historically. The com-
pany uses its sorting centers to make sure delivery▼ Global funding
for supply chain and
logisticscompaniesQ1’18 Q4 ’20$8b40trucks are packed with orders in close proximity to
make each route efficient.
FedEx and UPS were mainly designed to serve
downtown business districts, while Pandion has
the advantage of building an operation that focuses
on residential deliveries from the start, Ruffin says.
The startup also plans to use software to route
packages in real time and avoid bottlenecks in the
delivery network, similar to commuters using the
navigation app Waze to avoid traffic jams on their
way to work. Most e-commerce orders make three
or four stops at various shipping hubs on the journey
from a company’s warehouse to a customer’s door,
and Pandion’s software will evaluate each step along
the way. It’s a feature Ruffin says will differentiate his
startup from Pitney Bowes Inc., Deutsche Post AG’s
DHL unit, and other competitors.
“The big parcel companies have a ton of organi-
zational baggage that makes it difficult for them to
adapt and evolve to meet the demands of residential
e-commerce delivery,” says Pandion investor Julian
Counihan, a partner at Schematic Ventures, of com-
petitors FedEx and UPS. “Year after year, they can’t
handle the volume.” Meanwhile, the online shop-
ping orders keep coming. �Spencer Soper● Singaporehaspasseda lawallowingpolice
toaccessinfogatheredtocontainthepandemic
in certaincaseswasusedbyabout78%ofSingapore’sresidents,
orabout4.2million people. But that same month,
Singapore became an example of how many
people’s fears about such apps would be real-
ized. Authorities disclosed that police had used
TraceTogether’s data in a murder investigation,
only months after the government had vowed it
would be used only for Covid-19 containment.
Police in Singapore have wide latitude to use
dataininvestigations,butthegovernmentissued
a rareapology.Insteadofbackingdown,though,
thecitystate’slegislaturethencodifiedlawenforce-
ment’sabilitytotapintosuchdataininvestigations
insevencategoriesofseriouscrime,includingmur-
der,rape,anddrugtrafficking.
“Theseareextraordinarytimesandexceptional
circumstances,”MinisterVivianBalakrishnansaid
thismonthinParliament,addingthatdatawould
be“properlysafeguardedandusedonlyforthe
appropriate purposes.” TraceTogether data is auto-
matically purged after 25 days, and the whole pro-
gram will be retired once the pandemic is over.
The World Health Organization issued guide-
lines to governments in May urging them notIntheearlymonthsofthepandemic,Singapore’s
TraceTogetherappwasheldupasa modelforother
nationslookingtousemobiletechnologytofightthe
coronavirus.Thegovernmentencouragedpeopleto
downloadthesoftware,whichusesBluetoothsen-
sorsinphonestonotifyusersif they’vebeenincon-
tactwithsomeonewho’stestedpositive.Tostem
concernsaboutprivacyandsecurity,it published
thesourcecodeandpromisedstrictlimits on data
use. Developers from around the world pitched in
to hone and debug the app in real time.
While initial uptake was sluggish, a govern-
ment minister said in January that TraceTogetherThe Temptation of
Covid-Tracing Data
“Singaporeis
saying to other
governments,
with a wink
and a nod, that
we’ve done
it and you can
do it, too”