Shipamax raises $7M to digitise and automate global logistics back-office

• $7 million Series A investment led by Mosaic Ventures; with participation from existing investors Crane Venture Partners and Y Combinator 
• Processes 18M emails and documents a year, with zero customer churn
• Anti-template technology saves world’s largest logistic brands 80% in costs

Pressure from Amazon has increased the importance of supply chain optimisation for shippers. These shippers are demanding more and more support from their freight forwarders and logistics partners, making automation a strategic must-have to stay competitive.

Shipamax provides logistics organisations such as freight forwarders with a toolkit to automate back-office processes. Currently, logistics providers can receive up to 25 documents for every shipment they manage and a deluge of email. Operations teams must spend endless, repetitive time and human energy downloading these, searching Transport Management System (TMS) / Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems to find the shipment and manually updating the records. 

Shipamax automatically identifies these emails and documents, extracts and understands the data and syncs with these key systems via their open API. 

Today, Shipamax supports all shapes and sizes of logistics organisations with their digital transformation, having started in the bulk shipping segment. Nearly four years has been spent perfecting the underlying “anti-template” technology - the key that makes the technology scalable across the huge variety of logistics documents. 

Companies who have previously tried to solve this problem have typically turned to an optical character recognition (OCR) tool such as Abbyy. The problem with OCR technology is that each company has to start from scratch - setting up hundreds of ‘templates’ to capture important fields and implementing ‘rules’ to interpret this data. Given logistics documents vary wildly in form and content, this setup tends to break and be incredibly painful to maintain. 

Shipamax provides a plug and play solution. The anti-template technology understands the context of logistics documents, outputting a clean, structured data feed. As a specialist provider, Shipamax’ UI is carefully crafted to sit natively within a user’s current workflow and out-of-the box integrations ensure data is synced in real-time with enterprise logistics systems such as CargoWise.

The company now processes in excess of 18M emails & documents per year. Performance is tracked by document type - with accuracy reaching 99% for the most advanced types. Types include Orders, Bills of Lading, Supplier Invoices, Commercial Invoices & Packing lists. Accuracy must reach 92% before the type is released from beta.

Jenna Brown, Co-Founder and CEO of Shipamax:

“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.”

Simon Levene, Co-Founder and Partner of Mosaic Ventures adds:

“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 months ahead, investing both in engineering development  and customer success -- the latter of which has been pivotal in Shipamax’s achievement of zero customer churn.

Founders Jenna Brown and Fabian Blaicher have a background in the logistics industry combined with software and startup experience. Brown most recently worked at London’s “fintech darling” GoCardless. Blaicher is a published computer scientist after starting his first software company, aged 18.

Logistics services is a $658B dollar industry, with freight forwarders and traditional shippers under pressure to increase margins and future-proof themselves from the wave of new digital providers. 

We'd love to talk

Shipamax helps free logistics companies from manual admin using plug and play automation. If you're a logistics company and you’d like to learn more about back office document automation, we would love to hear from you.