Singapore Exchange leads $44m investment in Hong Kong’s ‘Expedia for freight’

Photo credit: Maersk Line

Hong Kong-based Freightos has raised US$44.4 million in a series C round led by Singapore Exchange (SGX), the company that runs the city-state’s bourse. General Electric’s GE Ventures and Israeli venture capital firms Aleph and ICV are among the other investors that participated.

Freightos runs an online marketplace for logistics services, enabling importers and exporters to instantly compare prices from more than 1,200 providers of air, land, and sea transportation. Once they’ve selected a provider, they can book and track their shipments on the platform. It serves a wide range of customers and suppliers, from ecommerce merchants to Fortune 500 companies, and small freight forwarders to international carriers. It also develops tech for logistics providers that automate their pricing and sales.

The company’s founder and CEO, British-Israeli serial entrepreneur Zvi Schrieber, has described it as “the equivalent of [travel-booking sites] Expedia, Orbitz, or Kayak for the shipment of goods rather than people. We help the sellers automate their quotes online and we help the buyers compare prices and quality and find the best deal.”

Serving as a middleman in the global logistics industry – which is estimated to reach as much as US$15.5 trillion in value within the next five years – allows Freightos to collect large volumes of data on freight rates. It claims to have over 1 billion such datapoints, which it uses to compile the Freightos International Freight Index in partnership with the Baltic Exchange – a London-based information provider and trading platform for the maritime shipping industry owned by SGX.

By leading the series C round, SGX is set to deepen its collaboration with Freightos. The startup said it will use some of the funding to explore the development of risk-management tools and freight industry-linked financial instruments in partnership with the bourse.