New Wave Company Update: Freightos raises $4.6 million in VC funding for global expansion by Jon Hansen

Well it didn’t take long for one of our Year in the Life co-winners to start creating waves in terms of making their mark in 2014.

On Monday I received an e-mail from Freightos sharing the news that the company had just raised “$4.6 million from three Israeli VCs in a series B, in order to help us expand more aggressively on a global level.”

While we will be scheduling a brief interview with the executive team from Freightos and sharing it with you in an upcoming post, here is an excerpt from the official press release;

Freight Industry Innovation Gets Boost with Venture Capital Investment in Freightos

Aleph and ICV fund Freightos in providing multi-trillion dollar freight industry with new networking and automated quoting solution.

Freightos, the global online freight network, today announced the completion of a $4.6 million Series B funding. The series was led by Aleph and ICV, with follow on investment from OurCrowd.

Global trade has expanded by 400 percent in the past two decades, supported by a trillion dollar cargo industry.  However, the technologies used to price and sell freight services have barely changed.  The average  international shipment price quote takes three days and about half of all companies are dissatisfied with their freight vendor’s IT capabilities.

“We saw an opportunity to dramatically change an industry – and for us, nothing is more exciting,” said Zvi Schreiber, CEO of Freightos. “Freightos empowers supply chain companies to demand instant, all-inclusive price quotes for moving cargo from points A to B to C. We are bringing freight vendors into the 21st century with web technologies and big data algorithms to automate and expand their business.”

Since 2013, Freightos has been adopted by dozens of multi-national and independent freight forwarders.  Using the Freightos Network and cutting-edge technology, freight forwarders are experiencing dramatic increases in sales and shippers are given faster service and more choices to optimize their supply chain. By providing
transparency into routes and modes and avoiding the current system of underutilized vessels and inefficient lanes, freight vendors and shippers may utilize Freightos to increase their efficiency and reduce their carbon footprint.

Freightos offers:

• – The Freightos Network for synchronous, global rate sharing across freighting vendors
  – Automated door-to-door online multimodal and multi-leg routing and quoting
  – A repository for freight tariffs of all modes and tools for reading carrier contracts
  – Business intelligence for analyzing sales and price trends
  – Multilingual and multiple currency support, across road, rail, ocean or air transport

“Freight is the backbone of the global economy but its technology has not scaled with the industry,” said Glen Schwaber of ICV. “The Freightos B2B networking and automation vision is one of connectivity and transparency that promises to make the freight world faster, more efficient and more eco-friendly than ever before.”

“Networked software and big data are going to transform many industries in need of radical evolutions to service 21st century customers,” said Michael Eisenberg, founding partner at Aleph. “We invested in Freightos because we believe the freighting industry deserves this transformation. The synchronous network and
automated services Freightos offers will bring internet speed and enable ‘economies of networks’ which we can’t even fully imagine today.”

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