Transport is responsible for around 23% of global greenhouse gas emissions and inland transport 72% of this total, with 69% coming from road vehicles. Since empty or unpaid trucks produce more emissions than all international flights combined, much of these emissions could be reduced by greater efficiency in this industry, which is still dominated by manual processes. This partly explains why Belgium-based startup Qargo has now raised £11 million ($14 million) in a Series A round led by Balderton Capital.
With the logistics industry facing rising operating costs, decarbonisation pressures, rising fuel prices and cyber attacks, companies in the space are going through tough times. Many shipping companies have collapsed UK only. There is clear pressure to digitize the industry to save costs.
While the transportation industry uses legacy software platforms such as McLeod Software, Rose Rocket and Dash Docmany of these platforms are of an earlier era.
This is where Qargo hopes its newer technologies can help it outpace 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 can process orders up to 10 times faster faster than traditional tools. It can automatically import PDF files and automate address lookups, as well as combine truckloads into more optimal routes that reduce distances, minimize empty loads and therefore reduce carbon emissions.
“Most of the biggest logistics companies use legacy transport management systems: Basically a big database that requires a lot of manual data entry. Our system has a lot more integrations, some artificial intelligence and design optimization and essentially does the same thing, but much faster and more efficiently,” Coppens said.
“Logistics is an older industry where the environmental angle does not have many features. Trucking is a very inefficient sector, with a lot of pollution, and is one of the last frontiers that software has yet to fully penetrate. The company’s planning is mainly done on paper or Excel sheets.”
Qargo claims the UK Anglia Freight used its platform to achieve annual savings of more than 200,000 miles and optimize routes by more than 20 minutes per vehicle, per day.
Coppens feels that customers like Qargo because it is an operating system. “So if we were to go bankrupt, which some of our customers are concerned about, then they would be in big trouble because we do the planning. we do the pricing. I hope this funding announcement will give them more confidence – that we’re not just a startup that pops up and disappears, but that we’re here to stay.”
The transportation management software space is expected to grow to $19.1 billion by 2032according to market research firm Fact.MR.
In a statement, Rob Moffat, partner at Balderton Capital, said: “Logistics is a $5T market globally, but is often overlooked by software companies. Most companies in the industry are still using incredibly dated software that doesn’t meet their needs and are working around it with tables and calls.”
