Global freight forwarding is a $300B industry that facilitates the movement of cargo from one place to another through a series manual process. Solving the complex challenges facing freight forwarders and helping them to do more business faster, freight rate management platform Freightify is today announcing a $12M Series A funding round to save 70% of the time spent on manual tasks while halving the operational costs to do business for them.
The round was led by Sequoia Capital India & Sequoia Capital Southeast Asia with participation from Trail Mix Ventures and Alteria Capital. The round also includes returning investors Nordic Eye Venture Capital and Motion Ventures. Founded in 2016, Freightify initially started as a marketplace for freight forwarders to conveniently search, book and track freight
This experience in automating sea-freight paved the way to a SaaS pivot. Today, Freightify’s platform, with rate management and quoting capabilities, is able to empower freight forwarders to procure, manage and quote freight prices (including all possibly ancillary charges) in less than 2 minutes.
Freightify is navigating a unique approach in the industry, away from a marketplace model that offers a one-to-many solution, and more of an all-encompassing personalized platform that freight forwards can license as a white label solution for their websites offering an unparalleled engagement opportunity for their customers.
Over 200 freight forwarding companies providing global logistics services (across 45 countries) use Freightify to digitize their operations. These customers have reported halving the cost and a substantial time saving in doing business.
Some customers deploy a Freightify white-label platform and have reported an increase in retained business and an increase revenue by 20%. This success has seen revenues at Freightify triple in the last year as they have attracted large numbers of the top 100 freight forwarders around the world.
Raghavendra Viswanathan, CEO of Freightify, commented “For too long, freight forwarders have been restricted to spreadsheets and legacy processes to do business. We set up Freightify to remove the heavy lifting of manually providing quotations, accepting email/telephonic bookings, managing documentation, coordinating and tracking shipments. Freightify solves these challenges by giving them and their customers a live pricing platform like the ones used by travelers to compare airfares, showing real-time rates on a single screen. Freight forwarders are like the travel agents for global trade, however, air travel is not as complicated as global trade. Supply chains require experts to manage cargo throughout the entire lifecycle and freight forwarders play a vital role in greasing the wheels.”
Freightify’s new funding round will help launch new functionalities and deliver on a strong and expanded product roadmap, expand the sales team globally, especially in North America, build channel partnerships, and increase their brand awareness globally as they expand into new geographies and segments.
Harshjit Sethi, Managing Director, Sequoia Capital India commented: “The global freight forwarding industry with a market cap of over $300 billion has been never more ripe for disruption and adoption of technology. With the lack of structured pricing data that can be retrieved instantly and used across the freight forwarding value chain, we are truly excited to be partnering with the passionate team at Freightify, which provides white labeled rate automation solutions that is truly unique and can bring in a lot more visibility to the ever changing dynamic freight rates.”
Existing investor at Freightify, Nordic Eye’s Investment Partner and Manager, Ib Drachmann added: “We have been impressed by the common vision of the company to democratize technology for the freight forwarding ecosystem. We are happy to see the scale at which Freightify has been growing, adding new logos globally and strengthening their product capabilities. Hence, we are doubling down on backing Freightify.”
Raghavendran Viswanathan added: “We have been expanding rapidly across Europe, Australia and key regions in Asia pacific, and are currently expanding in North America. We have a highly skilled product and engineering team that can deliver on a strong product roadmap. Sales people on the field with deep experience in the freight industry. We are building out a strong marketing function that can drive growth.”
Looking ahead Raghavendran Viswanathan added: “Various marketplaces around the world are attempting to become the Amazon of services for freight forwarders, which will help. We believe in empowering the freight forwarders and are taking the Shopify route by selling a SaaS product to enable them manage and create their own communities”
