FreightHub is a digital freight forwarder offering sea, air and rail transport services built on digitized processes spanning booking, communication, data exchange, document management and supply-chain optimization. The company positions itself to replace traditional freight-forwarding firms that rely on legacy IT and manual workflows. After a $20M Series A last year, FreightHub invested heavily in digital collaboration tools, expanded system-integration interfaces and obtained an IATA license for air freight. FreightHub serves more than 1,500 customers, including Home24, Miele and Viessmann, and reports volumes grew 3x year-over-year. Headquartered in Germany with operations in Berlin and Hamburg, the company recently opened its first Asian office in Hong Kong and acquired a sea freight forwarder specializing in Asian imports. The startup says it will use the new capital to further develop its digital service offering and expand its presence in Asia. FreightHub positions itself as Europe’s first fully digital freight forwarder, providing end-to-end B2B services from quotation through shipping and tracking. The company offers real-time quotation and booking for sea, air, and rail routes between Asia and Europe and has built a proprietary transport management system (TMS) with real-time tracking and analytics. FreightHub has digitised customer acquisition and sales processes, using online channels and screen sharing rather than field sales. It reported acquiring more than 650 customers in its first 17 months, including e-commerce sites Home24 and Lesara and mid-market companies such as Franke and Viessmann. The startup generates revenue by adding a handling fee to carrier rates and says it may add enterprise software features in the long run to create combined transactional and software revenues. Co-founder and CEO Ferry Heilemann, who previously founded DailyDeal (sold to Google in 2011), leads the effort to replace legacy freight forwarding systems and improve transparency and efficiency. FreightHub operates a digital freight forwarding platform that allows customers to compare the latest quotations, book a container, ship it and arrange onward lorry transport, initially focusing on the Asia–Europe link. The portal stores various transport links and, after entry of origin and destination, displays available carriers with transparent information on costs, transit duration, ETA and ETD. The company has built a system to request quotations from the 14 biggest carriers, including Hamburg Süd, Maersk and Evergreen. Led by Ferry Heilemann (CEO), Erik Muttersbach (CTO) and Michael Wax (CCO), FreightHub aims to continue developing its platform and scale operations. The startup currently employs 20 people and plans to hire additional logistics experts, software developers, operations specialists and customer managers by the end of the year. The raised funds will be used to further develop the platform and expand the team and operations.

Total raised

$53M

Funding rounds

3

Latest round

Series B

Latest activity

May 2019