Rubikloud + Kinaxis: stronger together

Today, Rubikloud was officially acquired by Kinaxis, one of the fastest growing and most exciting enterprise software companies in Canada and the world. This is a special day for Rubikloud, and it would be easy to write a long post of personal reflections on the past seven years. I would rather save that for our teams and new colleagues. I also do not want to repeat all the great thoughts already shared on the topic. I do, however, want to take a moment to reflect on two important questions:

1. What makes the Kinaxis and Rubikloud partnership so special?
2. Why now?

What makes the Kinaxis and Rubikloud partnership so special?

In one simple word, culture. To me, culture goes beyond human resources programs and people. It starts with people, but it expands into the philosophy of building products, entering markets, supporting and servicing customers, and growing together with partners.

As we got to know the team at Kinaxis more, it was clear that they have built a truly special place that celebrates professional growth and puts their people first. But beyond people, Kinaxis has a philosophy of being relentlessly focused on understanding each vertical they enter and going as deep as necessary to serve their customers. Finally, all this focus on verticals never detracts from the product-driven nature of a single platform for all customers that is tied to mission critical business value. They are how we imagine our own company growing and maturing over the next 10+ years. The values and culture were aligned from day one.

Why now?

You hear the words “mission critical” a lot in tech. There was never any doubt that supply chain visibility, planning and overall efficiency are mission critical for every industry. But what happens when everything starts to be labeled as mission critical? You’re forced to prioritize. The past three months have changed the world forever. Business leaders are not only responsible for serving their employees, customers and communities, but they are now also asked to prioritize which mission critical problems to solve first. We have all personally experienced what happens when our global supply chain breaks down. We live in a globalized and interconnected world and every single company needs to put supply chain improvement at the top of their prioritization list. I would go even further to say that this is even more significant for companies that produce products that are used by people around the world in their everyday lives.

As we started to see Kinaxis as a complementary product in many of our CPG opportunities around the world, there was immediately a natural partnership opportunity. After several conversations about how concurrent planning combined with machine learning-based forecasting and optimizations would add immense value to the industries we were serving, we quickly realized that we needed to think bigger and move faster. Supply chain becoming the #1 problem for retailers and CPGs (and other industries) only added fuel to this thesis.

The global reach of Kinaxis, their industry-leading platform RapidResponse®, combined with Rubikloud’s ML forecasting and optimization products needed to get into the hands of as many customers as possible. We couldn’t wait any longer to take the best of both Kinaxis and Rubikloud and offer it to our markets.

In closing, let me just reiterate how excited I am to be joining forces with Kinaxis. It’s not often two Canadian companies with a global footprint come together to embark on an even more ambitious journey. In my opinion, this should happen more if we truly want to celebrate Canadian technology companies.

I wanted to say thank you to a few special groups of people.

• First and foremost, the Rubikrew. I didn’t build Rubikloud, we did. Thank you to every single one of you, past and present.
• Thank you to our customers, everyone from the earliest adopters to the most recent ones. Adding value to your organizations will remain at the forefront of our product development and servicing.
• Thank you to our “advisor bench.” Many of you prefer to stay anonymous but to call out a few - Jay Deen, Steven Woods, Frank Pho, Eric Olafson, Lisa Myers, and Chris O’Neill.
• Finally, thank you to our investors who believed in our thesis, our team and our desire to change an industry for the better.