A year and a half of operating during a pandemic, the global supply chain is a mess. Shipping routes, ports, air cargo, and trucking lines are experiencing massive disruptions. As a result, orders are backlogged, deliveries are delayed, goods are in limited supply, and transportation costs and consumer prices are rising.
“Global supply chains are under extreme pressure with record delays, unprecedented congestion at ports and constrained capacities. This has led to ridiculously high transportation costs which are being transferred to the end consumer, yet service reliability remains low. We believe that companies with predictive visibility on cargo movements have a significantly higher preparedness to downstream planning and customer service, and we have seen the impact with reductions in overall port fees by 20% and manual work by 80% for our customers,” says Nidhi Gupta, CEO and Co-Founder of Portcast.
The Singapore-based logistics tech startup just announced the completion of its US$3.2 million Pre-Series A financing led by Newtown Partners (via the Imperial Venture Fund) with participation from Innoport, the venture capital unit of the Schulte Group, TMV Ventures and Wavemaker Partners.
Portcast enables freight forwarders and manufacturers across the world to achieve real-time visibility, reduce operational costs and improve customer experience by accurately predicting the estimated time of arrivals of more than 90% of ships globally and forecasting demand for over 30,000 (air) routes daily through an intuitive SaaS platform and APIs. The cloud-based technology also has the ability to map out the cascading effects of disruptions, such as Typhoon In-fa, allowing forwarders and shippers to respond and react more effectively in such scenarios.
Since its launch in 2018, the Singapore-based company has already amassed an impressive list of freight forwarding and manufacturing customers across the world and predicts over 300,000 shipment events daily. The now raised capital will go towards international expansion, doubling the team size as well as product enhancement moving from predictive Artificial Intelligence (AI) to prescriptive AI and launching new product features such as order-level visibility and scenario planning.
As a strategic investor, Innoport has been providing funding for startups focusing on innovative solutions for the global maritime and logistics sector for over two years. With its latest investment, the company continues to grow its expanding portfolio of entrepreneurs aiming to transform global supply chains.“At Innoport, we invest in founders and companies that are willing to challenge the status quo in the maritime industry. Portcast fits that description well as their technology has global replicability to optimize port calls, save bunker and emissions through vessel route optimisation and improve efficiency of the entire supply chain,” says Haymon Sinapius, Investment Manager at Innoport.