SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
733: With $50M Raised, He's Leading Cargo Container Software Space
27 Jul 2017
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Founder of Freitas, his team is now 150 folks spread all over the world, but mainly in Jerusalem and Barcelona.
Chapter 2: What is Freightos and how does it operate in the international freight industry?
They started with their software as a service product, now up to about a thousand customers. The smallest ones pay, you know, a grand per month, all the way up to tens of thousands per month, depending on how large of a freight forwarder they are.
Chapter 3: What are the biggest cost components in the freight industry?
Again, they help now with their marketplace solution, match importers and exporters with these freight forwarders to bring efficiencies to very old conservative systems. This is episode 733.
Chapter 4: How does Freightos optimize the freight quoting process?
Coming up tomorrow morning, we talk to Ty. He's an ex-finance guy and also dad of three, but now he wants to own your home. But first, here's today's episode. This is The Top, where I interview entrepreneurs who are number one or number two in their industry in terms of revenue or customer base.
You'll learn how much revenue they're making, what their marketing funnel looks like, and how many customers they have.
Chapter 5: What is the revenue model for Freightos?
I'm now at $20,000 per top. Five and six million.
Chapter 6: How has Freightos grown since its launch?
He is hell-bent on global domination. We just broke our 100,000-unit sole market.
Chapter 7: What challenges do marketplace startups face in the freight industry?
And I'm your host, Nathan Latka. Hello, everybody. My guest today is Zvi Schreiber. He is the founder and CEO of a company called Freightos, the internet marketplace for the trillion-dollar international freight industry. Previously, he was the CEO of LightTech, which was acquired by GE, and founder and CEO of Unicorn, acquired by IBM.
Additionally, he was founder of G... I think it's just pronounced G-host, a predecessor of Dropbox.
Chapter 8: What is the significance of SaaS in Freightos' business model?
Oh, it's just Ghost. Great. Ghost, the predecessor of Dropbox, which ended in a fire sale. He's spoken widely and written many articles and patents. He's got a PhD in computer science and is the author of Fizz, which tells the history of physics as a novel. Zvi, are you ready to take us to the top? Hey. How are you this morning? Terrific. Thanks for having me on.
Yeah, no, thank you for coming on. Look, I love businesses like this because you get sick of hearing about these Silicon Valley companies that are competing for eyeballs in some media world that's like not really real. You're taking what you know and solving a real world problem and having some good success. And you had one that was in a fire sale.
So that's, you know, people might consider that a failure, but there's probably some interesting lessons there as well. So this will be a good one. Why don't you kick us off? Tell us what Freightos does and what's your revenue model? How do you generate money?
I mean, Freitas is targeting the world of international freight. And if you just look around yourself there, you'll see that, you know, most of the items in your house are imported or in your office. So your headphones, that screen, most of those books will be manufactured and printed in China or Vietnam or Lithuania or wherever it is. So, in fact, 90% of the products that we buy in the West are
are imported. So our entire lifestyle is very dependent on international freight. And like you said correctly in the introduction, it's a very, very large industry. It's about a trillion dollars are spent each year on shipping goods between countries. So very, very large.
Is that, break that down for me, Zvi. Is that trillion dollars, is that like the gas for the boat plus the cargo container? Like what, break down the three biggest costs in that trillion dollar spend.
Yeah, so it's sort of door-to-door in the end. So it's the truck to get to the port. It's the ocean liners. So it's your share of the gas and of the ship. A ship can contain up to 18,000 containers right now. But your stuff is in one of those containers, and you're paying your share of the gas and the other operating costs and the capital costs of the ship.
Then the port handling, it could come in through Long Beach, for example. It's the biggest port in the U.S. and California. So you're paying for the port handling and then you're paying for a train or a truck to get it all the way to the destination. So it's the totality of all of that.
So probably the ocean shipping and also the airlines as well are the biggest cost because some of the more urgent stuff is going by air. So the ocean and air are probably the biggest cost components, but there's a lot of other cost components as well.
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