Featured Startup Pitch: Freightos has built a shipping marketplace that automates the routing and pricing of freight from door-to-door

By Zvi Schreiber, Freightos founder and CEO

Elevator Pitch: Most everything we eat, wear and use has been shipped. Freight is a $4 trillion industry which is surprisingly un-automated. Freightos is revolutionizing the freight industry by automating the routing and pricing of freight services. The global Freightos Network allows vendors from around the world to buy and sell freight services online.

Product/Service Description

Freightos provides Software as a Service (SaaS) for freight forwarders to manage their rates and automate their routing and pricing, both internally and on their websites. The Freightos Network allows freight vendors to collaborate automatically with other vendors, and customers, to provide instant door-to-door quotes. Freightos is built on the Google Cloud and utilizes a big data approach to analyzing freight sales and pricing trends.

Founder’s Story

After ten years of creating software and Internet products, I did a stint managing an electronic power supply company. Hardware! Suddenly, I had to worry about manufacturing and inventory levels. One of the biggest surprises was that there was still no way to get an instant online quote for moving a container, or a few pallets from A-(usually China) to-B. Clearly, automation in the cargo industry was way behind passenger travel.

As soon as I got back to software, I created Freightos in order to introduce some much needed efficiency into the industry. The somewhat archaic nature of the freight world, which still often relies on cumbersome Excel spreadsheets, poses a hurdle for adoption. That said, the benefits of automation and customer-facing technology in an increasingly on-demand world cannot be ignored.

Market Opportunity

The size-and-scope of the freight industry provides a business opportunity of a scale which cannot be matched in most sectors. Global shipping continues to grow steadily, while becoming more complex every single year. Orchestrating air, maritime, rail and road shipping into already complex supply chains has become one of the biggest challenges of today’s global economy.

Some piecemeal solutions that assist in automating ocean or air freight quotes alone do exist, but none marry fully multi-modal, multi-leg quotes with intuitive customer-facing solutions. Headway already made with freight vendors around the world, including a global top-ten freight forwarder, validates a clear need for Freightos. By including easy sales management, business intelligence, and online manual quoting functionality, Freightos has become an invaluable tool for freight vendors.

Marketing Strategy

We are currently focusing on increasing the number of freight forwarders who use the Freightos SaaS platform for price quoting. As our customer base grows, our own customers become our best marketing asset, as they invite their partners to join them in the Freightos Network.

Differentiation

No other company is capable of automatically generating door-to-door, multi-mode quotes online on a customer-facing website. The Freightos Network is also the only network of freight forwarders automatically quoting to each other.

Business Model

Freightos is sold with a SaaS model of monthly subscriptions. Additionally, Freightos attracts transaction fees by introducing new customers into the Freightos Network.

Current Needs

We are currently scaling up the size of our development and customer success team in order to assist a growing customer base.

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Headquarters: Jerusalem