(CLICK IMAGE TO PLAY VIDEO)
Meet
Spotlite360 Technologies Inc. (LITE) (
CSE.LITE,
Forum) – an enterprise software company leveraging IoT technologies, blockchain, and machine learning (ML) to deliver supply chain solutions which result in improved tracing, tracking, visibility, efficiency, collaboration, and proof of sustainability claims. Spotlite360’s customers fall within pharmaceutical, healthcare, and agriculture. The Company is focused on helping companies evolve their digital supply chain strategies.
Stockhouse Media’s Dave Jackson was joined by company President James Greenwell of Spotlite360 Technologies Inc to tell us about his company that’s a true innovator in groundbreaking SaaS-based enterprise software and blockchain technology.
TRANSCRIPT BELOW
SH: To start off with, can you tell us a little bit about yourself and the history of the company?
JG: Yeah, you bet. So I grew up in Michigan. I was blessed early in my career to be a part of a roll-up. We acquired 40 companies in four years. We grew from a $100 million to $900 million and 900 employees to 8,000. We did an IPO, it was oversubscribed. We raised $110 million and then we exited the company a year later for a billion dollars. I then went on to be CEO of a SAAS based software company included investors like SAP. We were very successful at speech enabling mobile workers and particularly forklift drivers. I kind of knew a lot about supply chains, logistics, warehouse automation, operations and that company got caught up in a roll up in a positive way. We grew it very aggressively and we exited that company to Honeywell for $1.5 billion.
So I've had two billion exits. I then went on to a startup in sports nutrition, a company pretty well known in those circles called MusclePharm. We worked with Tiger Woods and Arnold Schwarzenegger. We grew that to a $200 million run rate and sold that company. That was part of a reverse merger also. So I have a background as a C-level executive, board member of a number of public, private equity backed venture backed companies and I'm really excited about what we're doing with SpotLite360. It's a SAAS based enterprise scalable software company that leverages sensors and the internet of things, IOT. So we use sensor technology in the supply chain to track event driven data and capture that data and provide better efficiency, tracing, tracking visibility across the whole supply chain. We're licensing and leveraging some other technology partners software and architecture. So this is proven, it's in the marketplace andit's well-received in a variety of other markets and we're targeting pharmaceutical, healthcare and agriculture, which includes cannabis.I'll touch on that in a minute.
SH: Can you update our investor audience and your Spotlite360 shareholders on any new company developments, especially in the wake of COVID-19?
JG: COVID has clearly put a lot more pressure on the supply chain and anybody that reads a newspaper can read about all these supply shortages and so on. They really didn't track and trace a lot of things in the supply chain. Sothere are regulatory demands, compliance demands, in agriculture the FDA, in pharma there's a Drug Security Supply Chain Act andHealth Canada. There's a lot of pressures that are coming down where people are saying, we want to know the origin, we want to know the chain of custody. We want to know the authenticity and counterfeit and theft and damage and now with COVID there's temperaturesensitivity and packaging and smart labels.All these things are unknown to many of the companies in the supply chain ecosystem and certainly to the end user, to the consumer. We look to create a whole bunch of visibility around all that. that's what's exciting to us.
SH: There are now a lot of players that have entered the crypto / blockchain sector over the past few years. James, what separates Spotlite360 from the competition and makes your business model unique?
JG: Well, we're not a traditional kind of crypto blockchain company. Weutilize blockchain for event driven data and so smart contracts, dates, and time stamps and a distributed ledger model of all the things that happened in the supply chain. So imagine agriculture, there's a farmer, there's a processor, there's a smart contract, there's a private label, there's manufacturing, there's packaging and there's distributors. All of these companies may work together, but they may not have the passing of the data across the supply chain. So imagine the supply chain is like links on a bicycle chain and we're the sprocket that touches every single link. One link may only talk to the link before or after.We want to connect all these links and ultimately you could look at us as a big data company. We want to pass the baton and carry all the data. So you know the chain of custody of everything that is made anywhere in our target markets.
SH: For Stockhouse investors that might be new to this space, can you explain what’s the difference you’re creating in the future of supply chains you just talked about?
JG: Well, it's about tracing, tracking, visibility, proof of sustainability, proof of ESG, (Environmental, Social, and Governance Compliance). There are a lot of companies that make claims on packages. For example, it's organic or it's kosher or it's gluten-free or there's no cross-contamination. We want to prove that in the supply chain with immutable distributed ledger auditable data. So if we say it's organic and the company invested significant investment of time and dollars into being organic, there's a lot of rules about organic and what is organic. We want to be able to prove thatand it's not just a label claim. It's somebody that can interrogate that. I mean, I think everybody is curious and social media and Google driven all kinds of questions. We want to be able to have that underlining a sustainability ESG proof to all the players in the ecosystem and ultimately to the consumers have for, consumer safety.
SH: You’ve recently announced your public listing on the Canadian Securities Exchange. This may be news to many investors. Can you unpack the benefits of going to this exchange?
JG: Wellabsolutely. It creates greater awareness of what we're doing.This isa startup and we're excited to be on the CSE. Because we're very entrepreneurial and this gives us access to capital markets. Creates that awareness and in our view, based on our execution and performance will create greater value for all the people that are involved likeour customers, our stakeholders, our employees, and the whole ecosystem.
SH: For company shareholders and potential investors, what kind of future development and progress can we expect across your extensive software portfolio?
JG: Here's something that we're innovating right now, which is truly revolutionary and through COVID-19 people have gotten used to using a QR code to access a menu at a restaurant or to access some data. We envisioned a future where the QR code can be printed on the package. So a consumer making a purchasing decision can scan the QR code on their smartphone and they can interrogate the supply chain of that product. So imagine you could get a Tik Tok like videos of the farmer growing something or harvesting something and it's kind of social media meets supply chain. Where a consumer could Google the supply chain and see the authenticity. It takes out counterfeit, theft, damage and authenticity. It really proves the origin, and the chain of custody. So our view is the consumers will become more and more viral and accustomed to, I want to see what I'm buying. And I want to buy something that their values, the company's values, the brand values align with my values. In some cases with cannabis, for example, it's a bit of the wild, wild west. Where in the United States, it's federally illegal. So there's no oversight from the federal level for FDA or EPA or even banking and a whole bunch of unintended consequences. So now we become self regulated and consumer safety drives success of the brand.
SH: What’s the long-term strategy for the company moving into 2021 and beyond?
JG: As I said, we are educating the market that these things are available today. People don't realize that when you see something on a label, like it says it's kosher or halal,who are the people that actually did that. I want to see a bio. I want to meet the person. I want to see a video of that. So in long term we want to educate the market on this kind of data and this kind of curiosity can be satisfied. So that ultimately the consumers will drive the behavior. I will pay a premium for a product if they are sustainable or if they are carbon neutral. The only way you can be carbon neutral is if you capture the data of your carbon footprint through the supply chain and now, we'll start to capture that data. So long-term, we look for the market to draw us in and create standards. Whether it's legislatively or through regulationor it's just consumer behavior where anybody can ask any question about; what's the origin? where did it come from? Is it safe? What does the company value? What do I value?
SH: Can you tell our audience a little bit about your corporate management team, along with the experience and innovative ideas they bring to the blockchain software and supply chain space?
JG: Well, It's early and we're building a company here. So it is very entrepreneurial. As I saidearlier in a little bit of my bio, I've grown a number of successful companies. We look to build the management team here. We have an experienced CFO that has public market experience. We've added a number of advisors on our board of advisors that come from the industry. They have deep governmental compliance. they're businesspeople. They open up a lot of capital markets knowledge to us. They can read a financial statement, sit on an audit committee and so we're building a company that will be a very strong operating performer in our mind.
SH: And finally, James, if there’s anything I’ve overlooked please feel free to elaborate.
JG: We think that this is a disruptive technology. We think that obviously a SAAS architecture allows us to deploy quickly! Write once, sell many. It becomes very high margin. As we build it out, we see a lot of opportunity to build technologies using different kinds of sensors. We're agnostic to the sensor. We can plug and play with any sensor that's out there, any technology around temperature control and gyroscopes and accelerometers and GPS. We go and grab and capture all that data. So we see ourselves as providing data in the ecosystem to the various companies that are in that supply chain that previously didn't even know they were doing business together. You may have had a bowl of corn flakes this morning and you don't really know where the corn came from. In fact, the brand may not even own the corn farm, but we will expose that, and we will give the consumer visibility all the way back to the seed and the soil test and the water test and all the tests that carry along with the product to ensure that it is sustainable. It does have chain of custody. It is safeand ultimatelyit supports the values that we support.
For more information, visit
www.spotlite360.com
FULL DISCLOSURE: This is a paid article produced by Stockhouse Publishing.