Cargo Angels

Vaccines exposed to too high or too low temperatures may not only lose their effectiveness but also prove deadly to the vulnerable populations they are intended to protect. The cold chain mostly breaks in the last mile when distribution relies on often low-paid and low-motivated workers. 

Cargo Angels utilizes secure sensors to capture environmental data and provide warnings before damage happens. Supply chain workers can easily obtain the data with their smartphone and be rewarded for doing so, and for handling the cargo with care. 

By placing incentivization credit on smart stickers placed on sensitive cargo, the shipper (or sponsor of vaccination campaign) can motivate supply chain workers, gain valuable and reliable data, and effectively save lives. 

All data captured by smart stickers is protected by encryption. Incentives are paid directly to handler's "wallet". Data collection and payments are decentralized and infrastructure-free, using only smart stickers and handlers' smartphones.

"Without overcoming transport challenges, the UN’s Sustainable Development Goal 3, including access to safe, effective, quality and affordable medicines and vaccines for all, will remain unreachable." (villagereach.org)

According to Médecins Sans Frontières, 35% of vaccines in developing countries were damaged due to freezing or overheating. (Source)

For vaccines, the last mile of cold chain delivery in cold boxes presents the primary problem in third world countries. But first world countries haven't solved it either. The problem gets much bigger during wide-scale immunization campaigns, such as those caused by pandemics, given the poor scalability of last mile of cold chain infrastructure (couriers, etc.)

This results in the last mile of transport being the biggest point of failure in cold chain due to lack of resources and incentives. Couriers are not paid for monitoring of sensitive cargo or for providing visibility into its current environmental status, location, or other highly valuable data needed for optimizing this part of logistics. Root causes of damage cannot be analyzed when this valuable data from the last mile is not collected. This unbalanced cold chain, prone to being broken at its very end points, effectively causes wastage of the investments into delivering life-saving drugs.

Cargo Angels is a solution for proactive prevention of cargo damage. It is decentralized, simple to deploy, inexpensive, and infrastructure-free. It enables collection of the last mile data in environmentally sensitive and heterogenous logistics of vaccines, and rewards key logistics collaborators for data collection and successful delivery.

Created using the domain expertise and data from TVM cargo insurance company, built on top of secure IoT Crayonic platform, and inspired by blockchain crypto-economics, our solution radically optimizes the last mile delivery by utilizing three principal mechanisms:

MEASURING AND COLLECTING detailed environmental, anonymized positioning, and contact tracing data using secure sensors.
Benefits: Optimization of the last mile logistics based on data and visibility, enabling damage root cause analyses, providing undisputable proof for insurance claims. 

INFORMING AND WARNING the last mile delivery personnel of potential cargo damage in real-time conditions.
Benefit: Damage can be prevented before it actually happens. 

INCENTIVIZING AND REWARDING data collection (unconditionally) and successful delivery of sensitive cargo (conditionally) via micropayments directly to the last mile delivery personnel. 
Benefit: Change of behavior, increased motivation of last mile delivery personnel to care for the cargo, to prevent damage, and to scan and send data from sensors.

Cargo Angels is a solution that can save thousands of lives and significant amounts of money that is being lost due to interrupted cold chain and lack of visibility in the most distributed supply chain end points. 

Our service provides value by creating the cold chain monitoring infrastructure out of the fragmented resources of supply chain actors. This decentralized monitoring infrastructure, in turn, provides much needed visibility into the distribution of vaccines which allows all parties involved in the immunization campaign to further optimize their logistics. A

At the same time, our solution creates economic opportunities for people involved in the last mile delivery rewarding them for acting in the best interest of the immunization campaign. 

Cargo Angels is a win-win solution for all immunization campaign actors:

Vaccine manufacturers get detailed near-real-time data on geographic distribution and quality of vaccines down to a single dose at the patient level.
Private and public campaign investors obtain valuable data on quality of service from the field.
Personnel distributing vaccines in the last mile receive fair reward for on-time and in-quality delivery.
Vaccine recipients and patients know if the vaccine has not been spoiled as well as its origin. 

There is a strong reactive as well as proactive dimension of Cargo Angels on the current COVID-19 pandemic and any future ones.

Reactive Without huge investments in infrastructure and training Cargo Angels can significantly reduce costs of immunization campaign by preventing damage caused primarily by interrupted cold chain.

Proactive By collecting accurate and reliable data Cargo Angels can provide highly valuable insight on when and where damage takes place, giving logistics experts the possibility to target points of failure and optimize supply chain.

On top of that Cargo Angels can prevent distribution of fake drugs. 

Competitors

• Autonomous trackers (approx. $150) mostly combined with a mobile app.
• Simple mechanical trackers (approx. $50) only showing if vaccine was frozen or heated.

There is no last-mile solution capable of delivering fine-grained data on environmental status, geopositioning, and delivery acceptance at price of $5/batch.

Cargo Angels is highly secure and decentralized by design. Fully digital, auditable, and secured data collection from trusted endpoints (secure sensors) to blockchain-backed distributed databases. In contrast to solutions based on paper and centralized cloud data creating significant privacy and compliance risks.

Plug-and-play solution deployable without complex integration at any scale. Utilizes existing resources available on the ground (i.e. smartphones even without internet connectivity) instead of building complex expensive centralized infrastructure, enabling very simple yet secure data collection.

Unlike centralized expensive IOT schemes (i.e. autonomous GSM trackers), our technology enables detailed visibility down to a single delivered dose – compared to large cargo trackers where data trail ends in distribution warehouses at palette or container level.

Maximum privacy and data protection available with today's technologies based on self-sovereign identity protecting people and infrastructure.

Cargo Angels is driven by an incentivization scheme for anyone collecting IOT data. Enabling fair access to compensation for service and value delivered – paying for quality of service (safely delivered cargo) versus just quantity i.e. miles traveled. Currently no other solution offers micropayment incentives for data collection, improved handling, and active monitoring to people who can significantly influence safe final delivery of sensitive cargo. 

Vaccine manufacturers buy Cargo Angel stickers and place them on vaccine boxes. Secure environmental sensors are inside the sticker or in a separate capsule placed inside the box. Multiple paper stickers come with each sensor for easy reach of last-mile personnel to QR code.

Stickers and drop-in sensors are linked during provisioning process before the box is sealed. Sticker is placed on the box that carries minimum order quantity (i.e. 10 to 100 vaccines).

Once vaccine boxes reach the last mile, delivery personnel interact with the sticker by scanning the QR code using their smartphone. This collects and feeds the system with anonymized and secured last mile data. 

Recipient of vaccine container accepts vaccines and checks their quality and origin by scanning the Cargo Angel sticker. Recipient gets information on possible damages due to temperature / light / humidity excursions. Recipient accepts vaccines for application to patients or refuses them. 

Data collected by smartphones are secured (digitally signed and encrypted) by sensors before they are uploaded. Upon reaching internet connectivity data is sent using small data packets to distributed databases around the world operated by multiple parties.

Cargo Angels decentralized oracle service combs data this data looking for temperature excursion alarms and feeds these critical data to blockchain smart contracts. Smart contracts distribute virtual tokens to smartphone-linked cloud wallets of last-mile delivery personnel, based on their activity. 

The last-mile personnel can exchange virtual tokens using third-party payment gateways into fiat such as mPesa e-money or whatever “currency” they prefer.

Cargo Angels stickers have been successfully tested in a POC by Thales Group and a sensitive food producer (chocolates sent in a container from Europe to Asia) providing valuable data to the shippers. 

Most smartphones are equipped with camera turning them into QR code scanners. All smartphones connect to the internet and thus can serve to send secured data. 

Blockchain is a proven secure technology of distributed databases. 

Each year about 8 B EUR worth of damage is being claimed which represents 4% of the total chain value! In addition, the No. 1 root cause for the damage is human error during manual handling of the cargo. In some countries this human error is as high as 50% and many EU countries are also above the average. The only good news is that 70% of the damage caused by people can be avoided.

Also, up to 50% of vaccine doses could be saved if properly handled from the manufacturer all the way to the patient. 

Although the rest of the supply chain of vaccines is optimized, the last mile is critical and very dependent on personnel that is often low-paid and not motivated. Being able to provide tangible reward to the last-mile personnel vaccine producers and organizations responsible for large immunization campaigns could significantly save costs and also gain data insight previously unavailable on a large scale.

Currently: 0

In one year: hundreds of thousands

In five years: millions to billions

According to the WHO statistics, vaccine delivery in the poorest countries represents market of about 70 million children that need to be vaccinated each year at the average cost of about 50 USD per child.

Cargo Angels service is available down to granularity of 50 vaccines fitted in one cold box – at the cost of 10-20 USD per cold box (half the price of ordinary temperature tracker), which includes up to 10 USD of incentives paid out to the last mile personnel.

The impact increases exponentially during pandemics such as the expected global COVID-19 vaccination campaign.

In addition to the immunization campaigns, our solution is highly relevant in digital transformation of last mile data collection in any supply chain use case.

Our goal is to partner with key players in the vaccine manufacturing and logistics and enable scaling of our solution driven by the costs savings and data visibility value it provides.

Financing the manufacturing and testing

Product development and preparation for production worth approx. 500K USD. Large scale field testing and pilots are needed after small scale test execution (education vs. viral uptake) with associated costs approx. 1.2M USD. 

Certifications and third-party audits

Standard certifications (CE, FCC, etc.). Pharma certifications are required to achieve maximum compliance and trust taking about one year to complete and costing approx. 1M USD. Third-party audits worth approx. 400K USD

Marketing & Sales 

Buidling portfolio of services and scaling marketing & sales activities

We plan to offer our solution as a service (pay-per-sticker) to major vaccine manufacturers in the first market deployment stages, assuming these corporations have large margins capable of accommodating monitoring and the visibility costs required for optimizing distribution and the supply chain feedback. 

Other market entries considered are nonprofits operating the immunization campaigns which usually spend large resources on campaign monitoring and data collection as digitizing and automating these data proves highly valuable to them. Here, we may partner with cold box manufacturers for direct integration of our technology into the cold boxes. 

N/A

Currently:

3 Full-time staff

3 Part-time contractors

1 Part-time advisor

Peter Kolarov | CEO & Founder -- Serial entrepreneur, SW developer, enterprise architect.

Michal Varchola, PhD | CTO & Co-Founder -- Cryptography HW engineer, HW security expert. 

Professor Juraj Kacur, PhD | Co-founder  -- Researcher, lecturer

Cristina Dolan| Senior Advisor -- MIT Media Lab Alum, Engineer, Entrepreneur, Solutionist.

Pavol Schmitzer | Business Development -- 10 years of experience bringing products to market.

Anton Bendis | Industrial Designer -- Decades of experience in design, manufacturing and logistics in Central Europe and Taiwan.

Jaroslav Ban, Timotej Stanek, Lukas Puchon -- Full stack SW developers with experience in cybersecurity, HW cryptography, blockchain.

Currently, we have a Letter of Intent signed with Thales Group to deploy Cargo Angels in sensitive technology logistics use case.

We are consulting with Pfizer; a European vaccine manufacturer; several medical doctors and pharma experts, as well as drug distributors. 

Our business model is based on price-per-sticker which includes compensation distributed to the last mile personnel. The price-per-sticker is mostly driven by the value it protects –- our initial pricing estimates are just below 10-15 USD per sticker/cargo protected.

Additional revenue streams are expected in solution integration (ERP, CRM) and customization (dashboards, reports) projects for large clients.

For market entry and scale up we expect to raise approx. 20M EUR in the Series A round, to scale the production and to build the portfolio of services, while scaling sales and marketing activities.

We also count with grants to cover the certification costs. We expect to reach the break-even point in 2024 with revenues of approx. 6M USD and

We believe that our solution can have major impact on success of vaccination campaigns while providing crucial data from the field and the last mile. At the same time it reduces financial inequalities in the logistics of these campaigns.

We are looking to find first major partners and we think MIT Solve can help us with these contacts.

UN WHO, any vaccination campaign organizing parties: private, non-profit and government organizations