London-based logistics software Shipamax raises $7 million Series A to roll out across industry

Shipamax, the London-based logistics automation software, has raised a $7 million Series A led by Mosaic Ventures, with support from Crane Venture Partners and Y Combinator.

Logistics services is a $658 billion dollar industry, with freight forwarders and traditional shippers under pressure to increase margins and future-proof themselves from the wave of new digital providers. Currently, logistics providers can receive up to 25 documents for a shipment, with extra emails on top. Operations teams spend valuable time and energy downloading these files, searching Transport Management System (TMS) or Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems to find the shipment and then manually updating the records. That’s why founders Jenna Brown and Fabian Blaicher created Shipamax in 2016, to pioneer the digital transformation of logistics and keep the unwieldy industry up to speed. Shipamax provides logistics organisations with a toolkit to automate back-office processes. The software automatically identifies these emails and documents, extracts and understands the data, and syncs with key systems via their open API. Unlike other solutions that use optical character recognition to identify information and plant it in a template, which the customer must build and maintain themselves, Shipamax is a plug-and-play tool. “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,” explained Jenna Brown, co-founder and CEO. The UK company reports that the software processes 18 million emails and documents a year, with zero customer churn. Such impressive numbers likely attracted investors to the round. Simon Levene of Mosaic Ventures sees a lot of promise: “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.”

The funding will help Shipamax double in size over the coming months, investing both in engineering and customer success.