The UN estimates at least 90% of the world’s physical goods end up in a shipping container before arriving at their destinations. Until recently, shippers have conducted much of their business as they have for decades: using spreadsheets, emails, and phone calls.
Those days are drawing to a close. Last year, venture investors backed more than 245 startups in shipping and supply-chain management, a record number worth at least $4 billion, reports business intelligence firm CB Insights. AngelList tracks 420 shipping startups (not all international), as well as hundreds more in logistics and supply-chain management.
While domestic logistics is being rapidly transformed by robotic warehouses, autonomous trucks, and on-demand services such as Uber, DoorDash, and Amazon Prime, the unglamorous world of international freight has remained largely a rolodex affair. A single shipping transaction may involve 28 different entities including customs, terminals, forwarders and carriers, reports Lloyd’s List, a marine intelligence firm. Many of these interactions still happen by email, phone and manual data entry, generating reams of paperwork. Startups spy an opportunity.
”Our competition is [Microsoft] Excel and email,” says Renee DiResta, co-founder and director of marketing at logistics startup Haven which builds software to replace today’s workflow. Haven, which raised $13.8 million in venture capital, is automating a quoting, booking, and shipping process in which setting a price for customers can take days. By accessing data about trillions of dollars in goods shipped around the world, Haven plans to help create an open, transparent shipping market that can be automated and optimized with machine learning.
The industry, long fixated on building bigger ships, is now turning its attention to the back office and customer experience. But designing new technology has proved challenging. In 2011, DHL spent $1 billion modernizing its own freight forwarding software, a failed effort that had to be written off four years later. Such efforts are nothing new.
