Shipamax, a London-based logistics process automation software provider, has raised $7 million in funding. Shipamax says it will use this funding to twofold in size over the days ahead, financing both in customer success and engineering development.
Founded in 2016, the company first set out to form an online broker for bulk shipping, prior to pivoting to a SaaS offering for wholesale shippers. Since the need for digitization was genuine, and the market wasn’t big enough for a VC scale business, Shipamax spun one more time to build a toolkit for back-office process automation for the international logistics business.
Shipamax co-founder Jenna Brown, tells TechCrunch, “We’d got some traction selling the SaaS solution, but saw the market was not big enough. We went back to the core of why companies were buying Shipamax and what we delivered for them. It became clear that the underlying data extraction technology we’d built was driving the core value.”
He adds, “After speaking to a number of people in adjacent segments of logistics, we saw companies there have the exact same problem — so it was clear we should really narrow the proposition down and widen out the segments we serve to the entire logistics market.”
Shipamax offers toolkits to logistics organizations that allow easy automation of back-office processes. The software automatically recognizes these emails and documents, studies, and understands the data, and syncs with central systems through open API. Unlike other systems using optical character recognition to categorize information and place it in a template, Shipamax is simply a plug-and-play tool.
The UK firm reveals that the software processes 18 million emails and documents every year, with no customer churn. Co-founder explains, “Our proprietary anti-template technology allows freight forwarders to reduce costs spent on data-entry by 80% and shift these resources to high-value tasks.”
These staggering numbers have attracted investors to the round. Simon Levene of Mosaic Ventures says, “After years of quiet development and training across millions of documents, Shipamax is in prime position to rapidly roll out across this massive industry, and bring enormous value to freight forwarders and shippers alike.”
