SHIPSTA, the digital platform transforming freight sourcing and procurement, today announced raising $10 million to accelerate its global expansion. The funding round was led by Dubai-based Tricap Investments, with participation from Chris Kirchner, co-founder and CEO at shipping and logistics process automation company Slync.io. Existing investors also took part in the round.
The focus on digital tools to optimize the supply chain has not only become a hallmark of innovation, but a must for shippers – especially global enterprises operating across multiple markets. The heavy reliance on manual processes in procurement is shifting to where businesses are now seeking tools that help them make better decisions, using data and advanced analytics – according to the latest report from Gartner[1].
SHIPSTA’s digital platform, launched in 2019 by Christian Wilhelm, Stefan Maratzki and Oliver Ritzmann, has been developed precisely to automate all these tasks and bring the power of digitization and freight data to service high performing procurement teams. Amid unprecedented levels of disruption and volatility in the shipping industry, SHIPSTA stands as a digital solution to connect shippers and carriers, providing data centricity, full visibility into their supply chain and controlling transportation costs.
“Enterprises now recognise that they need to be far more agile and responsive to these pressures. The ongoing logistics disruptions have in effect sparked a huge wave of digitalisation in logistics”, comments David Waroquier, CEO at SHIPSTA. “Since we launched in 2019, we already have over 100 enterprise clients, a third of which are Fortune 500 companies. This latest investment round reflects SHIPSTA’s innovative approach and will further accelerate our international expansion”.
“There’s a real need for logistics teams to transform freight sourcing and procurement processes as well as gain full visibility across markets for data driven decision-making,” comments Chris Kirchner, co-founder and CEO at Slync.io, which is backed by Goldman Sachs and raised $60m last year as it expands across Europe and Asia. “There’s an increasing number of shippers realizing the advantages of moving to a highly specialized, transportation-specific procurement tool, and SHIPSTA is certainly leading this transition”.
Some of the world’s largest pharmaceutical, construction, chemical, automotive and industrial companies are already using SHIPSTA’s platform to reduce their costs, centralize their data on a unified platform and achieve greater operational efficiency. “For multinationals spending hundreds of millions of dollars on freight, even small improvements can be enormously valuable,” comments Suleman Soorani at Tricap Investments. “SHIPSTA is taking a truly next-generation approach centred around data and it is by far the most intuitive and intelligent product available on the market as a result.”
