The world’s top carrier, Maersk, is investing in the German digital freight forwarder FreightHub. They are looking forward to improving the supply chain management and the customer experience in freights industry. This is an important step for digital transformation in logistics and it probably won’t be the only joint we’ll be seeing around, so traditional freight forwarders should look out.
We have recently learned that the startup and digital freight forwarder FreightHub raised $30 million from Maersk Growth in a series B financing round. FreightHub founder and CEO Ferry Heilemann said: “we will use the fresh capital to further develop our digital service offering and to expand our presence in Asia.”
The German startup offers freight services through air, sea, and rail, based on digitized processes that include booking, communication, documents management, data exchange, and supply chain optimization. FreightHub aims to compete with and replace traditional freight forwarders that rely mostly on manual processes and outdated systems.
“Our forwarding solution offers more transparency, reliability and ultimately time and cost advantages for large and mid-sized organizations,” said Michael Wax, FreightHub’s CCO. “Today, we serve some of the most well-known German brands and grew our volumes again 3x year over year.”
Heilemann, FreightHub’s CEO, also explained: “Our recent growth trajectory has confirmed the potential that our digital solutions can realize for both our customers and FreightHub’s internal processes.” Then he added that “with Maersk Growth, we have a new investor that offers extensive strategic insight and allows for mutual collaboration opportunities.”
Digital freight forwarder FreightHub and Maersk want to improve the supply chain management and customer experience.
On the other side, Jeppe Høier, partner at Maersk Growth, explained that FreightHub is a great fit since Maersk’s investment strategy “aims to explore and mature promising technologies with a potential to improve supply chain management and customer experience.”
“We believe in cooperation and learning experiences across the digital ecosystem of our industry and look forward to accompanying FreightHub in further developing as digital freight forwarder, and believe our cooperation can help both companies build on their capabilities and offerings to the benefit of existing and new customers in the SME segment”, Jeppe Høier stated.
FreightHub’s CTO, Erik Muttersbach, added: “What sets us apart, in particular, is the combination of experienced logistics experts, data-driven and therefore robust processes, as well as state-of-the-art technology.”
Finally, the digital freight forwarder’s COO, Michael Ardelt, pointed out that “the aim is to expand our network and provide a broader range of complex logistics services. A stronger presence in Asia will allow us to handle the processes on site independently and thus enable us to offer our customers a seamless end-to-end process”.
In other words, FreightHub along with Maersk Growth is going all for it, to expand its market share and revolutionize the industry. The freight business is still antiquated and traditional, but it has shown it’s ready to enter the new era. So, many startups like this digital freight forwarder are seizing the opportunity and are working on giving the logistics industry a turn to grow. It is definitely time for traditional players to step up and join the digital revolution or they will be soon left behind.
