Transport accounts for roughly 23% of worldwide greenhouse gas emissions, and inland waterway transport 72% of this total, of which 69% comes from road vehicles. Considering they produce empty or unfilled trucks more emissions than all international flights combinedmost of those emissions could possibly be reduced through greater efficiency in an industry that is still dominated by manual processes. This partly explains why the Belgium-based startup Kargo has now raised £11 million ($14 million) in a Series A round led by Balderton Capital.
As the logistics industry faces rising operating costs, decarbonization pressures, fuel price increases and… computer attacksspace industry firms are going through difficult times. Many transport firms went bankrupt in Great Britain itself. There is clear pressure to digitize the industry to bring savings.
Although the transportation industry uses legacy software platforms resembling McLeod Software, Rose rocket AND Doctor Dashmany of those platforms date back to an earlier era.
This is where Qargo hopes its newer technologies will help it stay ahead of the competition.
Founded in 2020 by Adriaan Coppens (CEO), Joeri de Turck (CTO) and Sander de Wilde (Head of Engineering), Qargo’s solution integrates with customers’ systems, and the company claims it might probably process orders up to 10 times faster than traditional tools. It can robotically import PDF files and automate address lookups, in addition to mix truck loads into more optimal trips that reduce distances, minimize empty loads and due to this fact reduce carbon emissions.
“Most larger logistics companies use legacy transportation management systems: essentially a large database that requires a lot of manual entry of data. Our system has a lot more integration, some artificial intelligence and planning optimization, and it basically does the same thing, but much faster and more efficiently,” Coppens said.
“Logistics is an older industry in which the environmental aspect does not play a significant role. Trucking is a highly inefficient, polluting industry, and one of the last frontiers that software has yet to fully cross. Business planning is mainly done on paper or in Excel spreadsheets.”
Qargo claims to be British Frei’s Englandfight used its platform to achieve annual savings of over 200,000 miles and optimize routes by over 20 minutes per vehicle per day.
Coppens believes that customers like Qargo because it is an operating system. “So if we went bankrupt, which is a concern for some of our clients, they would have a big problem because we are the ones doing the planning; we deal with invoicing. I hope this funding announcement gives them more confidence – that we are not just a startup that comes and goes, but that we are here to stay.”
The transportation management software space is expected grow to $19.1 billion by 2032according to the research company Fact.MR.
In a statement, Rob Moffat, partner at Balderton Capital, said: “Logistics is a $5,000 global market, but it is often overlooked by software vendors. Most companies in the industry are still using extremely outdated software that does not meet their needs, and are working to work around this problem with boards and connections.”