Today, I, Zvi Schreiber, CEO of Freightos, am beyond excited to share some big news with you—Freightos has acquired SHIPSTA! This is a huge step in our journey to digitalize global freight and build a more modern foundation for world trade.
The full press release is available here but I also wanted to share more about what this means and why we’re teaming up.
A Perfect Match for Our Mission
At Freightos, our mission has always been to bring international shipping into the 21st century, using digitalization to make it faster, more cost-effective, and more transparent for the organizations that literally move the world.
Crossing one million bookings annually in 2023, we’ve made significant headway in digitizing spot freight pricing and bookings, especially in air cargo. But, as we hear from our freight forwarder and shipper customers again and again, spot bookings aren’t everything. Most larger shippers move the lion’s share of their capacity using long-term contracts. That’s exactly where SHIPSTA comes in. SHIPSTA's expertise, built on deep industry knowledge and outstanding technology, has transformed freight tendering for importers and exporters, making SHIPSTA the perfect complement to our platform. Together, we can offer a complete solution that covers the digital procurement of both spot and contract freight services, across air, ocean, road, and rail.
We estimate that tenders account for some 50%-70% of freight procured, at the lower end for air, at the higher end for ocean. This corporate marriage doubles our addressable market and speeds up our journey towards profitability. It broadens our platform to allow carriers, forwarders, and shippers to buy and sell to each other at scale. SHIPSTA has built a strong business well on track to breakeven, accruing a portfolio of blue-chip customers like Rockwool, Puma, Thyssenkrupp, and others, and digitizing engagement with thousands of freight forwarders.
From a financial perspective, this acquisition is a strong move for Freightos. This drives an additional revenue contributions while adding strong growth potential across our data, solutions and platform business, supporting us reaching breakeven by the end of 2026.
The team is also a fantastic addition. I have met the SHIPSTA team in Luxembourg a number of times and believe they will be a welcome addition to our global team.
A Word from Christian Wilhelm, SHIPSTA's founder
Christian and his co-founder are the epitome of industry innovators, banking on a background in tender procurement at Kuehne+Nagel, where they learned how painful the process is. Painful enough to push them to found SHIPSTA in 2015 and scale the business to the point where they support billions of dollars worth of annual global freight procurement. SHIPSTA has also been recognized as an industry leader by other industry experts, winning a number of awards including Procurement Leaders’ World Procurement Award.
As Christian says:
“Joining forces with Freightos is an exciting new chapter for SHIPSTA. We’ve known Zvi and the team for years, and we share a common vision to bring global freight online. This partnership expands our capabilities and deepens our market reach, allowing us to provide both Freightos and SHIPSTA customers with more innovative and powerful solutions, and better service to optimize global freight transportation for forwarders, carriers and shippers."
Working Together for a Better Future
SHIPSTA and Freightos share a vision of a digitalized freight industry, but we attacked it from different ends, Freightos focusing more on spot procurement and SHIPSTA more on tenders. This marriage creates the world’s most comprehensive platform. We’re thrilled about the opportunities this acquisition brings, enabling us to offer a truly comprehensive procurement platform to both Freightos and SHIPSTA customers, and, of course, to our joint customers. Imagine the combined power of Freightos’ digital freight platform and SHIPSTA's tender procurement technology. It’s a truly better global freight industry that ultimately reduces supply chain costs, improves speed and agility, and keeps goods moving.
A Personal Note
I founded Freightos in 2012 based on the personal pains that I had experienced while shipping goods around the world. Someone forgot the international shipping industry in the 20th century and we are at the forefront of partnering with the industry to digitalize. But we never thought we could do it all ourselves. Along the journey, we’ve made some key acquisitions, including WebCargo, Clearit, and 7LFreight These acquisitions have enriched our team, our product, our network of customers and partners, and our financial position. Our team at Freightos, along with our new colleagues at SHIPSTA, share a passion for transforming one of the most important yet offline industries. Many of us have been at this for over a decade, persistently pursuing digitization that we genuinely believe benefits the industry and the world.
And it’s happening. Digital freight bookings on our platform number in the hundreds of thousands every quarter. Airlines representing over 70% of global air cargo capacity are on the WebCargo by Freightos platform and more ocean liners are in the process of joining. SHIPSTA's ability to digitalize tender procurement will accelerate how rapidly the industry can digitize and bring concrete benefits to world trade. Given how volatile global freight has been, the timing couldn’t be better.
To everyone who has supported us on this journey, team, customers, partners and investors, and to those who helped to build SHIPSTA, thank you. Your trust and encouragement mean the world to us. We’re committed to continuing our mission to digitize global freight, making international trade more efficient, agile, and transparent for everyone.
Here’s to a future full of exciting possibilities, together with SHIPSTA!