Their business model was convincing. Cargonexx is winner of “The Spark – The German Digital Award”, which was awarded by the business newspaper Handelsblatt and the consulting company McKinsey. This was not the only award ceremony for the start-up, which is ringing in the future of trucking, this year. They also were among the three finalists for the selection of the logistics start-up of the year in Austria and were nominated for the German Innovation Prize that was awarded by the newspaper Wirtschaftswoche and the consulting company Accenture.
Start-up Cargonexx has the vision to make trucking as simple as taxi driving. With its intelligent algorithm, empty load space is filled with idle capacities by only one click. This system is highly promising and its potential was also recognised outside of the German logistics industry. Multiple times the Hamburg-based company was awarded with prizes and nominations this year. Most recently, the Cargonexx team celebrated winning “The Spark – The German Digital Award”. The award ceremony took place in Berlin on 12 October.
“Of course we are convinced of our service, but we never imagined such an enormous response and such a positive feedback of a high-caliber jury,” commented Cargonexx CEO Rolf-Dieter Lafrenz on the award. The jury of “The Spark” was composed of the Director of McKinsey Germany, Cornelius Baur, and Editor-in-Chief of Handelsblatt, Sven Afhüppe. Both also hosted the award ceremony. Other jury members were representatives of leading companies and scientific institutes like Siemens, KUKA, Volkswagen, Max Planck Institute, TU Munich, and RWTH Aachen. They assessed the start-ups regarding this year’s competition topic, artificial intelligence.
Cargonexx was also among the finalists for the selection of the start-up of the year, awarded by the international weekly newspaper Verkehr. The votes came from an expert board as well as the readers of Verkehr. “Even if we did not make first place, we made it quite far for a German start-up. Not everyone is that well-known and recognized, even beyond Germany, after the first year of founding,” said Lafrenz.
In the category start-up, Cargonexx also turned heads at the German Innovation Prize. Every year, companies with outstanding innovations are awarded with this prize by the business newspaper Wirtschaftswoche and consulting company Accenture. An expert jury honours the finest minds in business. The event is under patronage of the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy.
“Although we were so successful this year, there is no time to relax. The logistics industry woke up from a deep sleep and we also continue to work on some new, big plans,” explains Lafrenz. Part of these plans is the participation at industry events like the 3PL Summit & Chief Supply Chain Officer Forum – Europe in Venlo. And at the 34th International Supply Chain Conference from 25-27 October in Berlin, Cargonexx will also have a booth in the start-up-passage and will showcase its innovative technology.
Cargonexx is a digital transportation network that was founded in 2016 by Rolf-Dieter Lafrenz and Andreas Karanas. The logistics platform has been in operation since December of the same year. At the very beginning, the algorithm was trained with 750,000 real data sets. Today, the algorithm refers to a data set of two million entries. Cargonexx operates in Germany, Austria, Denmark and Poland.
