Patrick Reames from CTRMCenter.com had the opportunity to catch-up with iRely recently, visiting with Meetesh Shah, iRely’s president, and Greg Taylor, an experienced and well-respected CTRM executive serving on the company’s board of advisors.
For those that may not be familiar with the company, iRely was founded in the early 2000’s as the technology provider for a global provider of tea and coffee. Though still owned by the founders, they have been an independent operation for many years and have grown into other asset classes and expanded their functional coverage both organically and via acquisition to cover virtually all ags/softs and some energy commodities as well, including fuels and propane. Functionally, the company’s flagship product, a relatively new and fully web-based application called i21, addresses virtually the entirety of the value chain in those covered commodities, including origination, processing, transportation, storage, trading, procurement, risk, contract management, CRM and accounting.
Though founded in the US, with headquarters in Fort Wayne Indiana, their operations now span the globe with more than 130 employees in Europe and Asia/Pac from which they can provide their global customers 24×7 support. With more than 400 customers, including six new customers signed in the last 60 days, the company is growing rapidly and finding significant success both internationally and in the US (with non-US sales accounting for about 50% of new deals in the last couple of years).
Though they were not at liberty to publicly disclose the names of their newest customers, Mr. Shah did indicate they include a global chocolate company, a global coffee company and a US-based major coffee brand. Other recent signing include smaller companies operating in the grains and softs space. Mr. Taylor indicated the scale of the companies they are able to service is a differentiator for iRely, and they count among their clients companies ranging from less than $100 million to more than $10 billion in annual revenues. He further noted that with their modern, fully web-based solution, they can service discrete components of the commodities supply chain; or, employing their breadth of functionality, operate as a fully capable ERP/CM solution (with a full-featured accounting system) from origination to retail for any of their clients.
When asked why they win versus the competition (which includes many familiar names to the CTRM space), Mr. Shah notes the breadth of capabilities for servicing most sectors of the market (from grain elevators & c-stores to global merchants & traders), and the strength of their services and implementation staff to quickly get new customers up and running successfully on their solution. Echoing this, Mr. Taylor noted that several of their recent customers who are now live on i21 came to iRely after having failed implementations with others vendors’ products.
It had been a while since we had last caught-up with iRely as the company has been relatively quiet for the last two or three years. Mr. Shah noted this “quiet period” was the result of the company working to integrate the various acquisitions they’ve made over the last several years and then replatforming those solutions into i21 to create a modern web-delivered product that they feel can compete and win against any competitor in the ags/softs, food/beverage and fuels space…and based on their recent success, it does look like they have re-emerged with a very strong offering.
https://www.ctrmcenter.com/blog/ags/irely-is-back-and-finding-solid-success-in-ags-and-softs/