Freight and shipping procurement platform Shipsta expects to launch a new product at the start of 2023.
The Mertert-based scale-up which was founded in 2019 to provide transparency, efficiency and automation to transport procurement, plans to deploy Gateway, a tool that will interact with the entire supply chain ecosystem for improved transportation execution.
Shipsta CEO David Waroquier describes the product as a “light transport management solution,” providing a bridge between shippers and carriers to offer transport orders assignments directly connected to Shipsta’s procurement platform and its dynamic rate engine.
He said: “In a sense, what we are doing is putting freight procurement at the centre of the ecosystem, providing procurement-based transportation management and procurement-based visibility management or freight settlement, optimizing transportation costs, enhancing speed and helping to better manage disruptions.”
The MVP is currently being tested with a dozen clients and prospects and is expected to be finalised by the end of the year.
The news comes as the scale-up experiences considerable growth, which Waroquier partly credits to two major industry awards. In June, Shipsta received the World Procurement Award from Procurement Leaders (considered the Procurement Oscars) for best tech provider, and in October it was awarded the best startup award at the Logistics Summit in Hamburg. Both awards contribute to increased visibility globally and most notably in the North American market and Europe where the company continues to expand its footprint. The US market currently makes up 20% of the firm’s revenues, up from under 5% a year ago.
“Large shippers from the US are reaching out to us. We’ve now received massive inbound requests globally,” Shipsta founder Christian Wilhelm said.
Waroquier accepts the awards also as recognition that the industry can no longer continue as it did previously, particularly in view of the industry crises in the market over the past three years.
“Enterprises need to manage a risk that didn’t exist before. Everyone believed that transportation flowed like water,” he said, adding: “But multiple crises have shown there is an urgency to integrate supplier risk deeply into supply chain management, manage capacities to procure, and source for an extended base of carriers, meaning increasing flexibility to run tenders more frequently, and building highly flexible procurement strategies around spot, mini-tenders, targeted tenders or regional/global tenders.”
He sees a massive digital adoption in supply chain and logistics players, which is reflected in the company’s growth: a trippling in client numbers to reach 100, team members and revenue over the last 12 months.
Shipsta is currently used in 25 countries, across Europe, the Americas and Asia.
