Freightos Grows GMV 800%, Exits COVID Stronger Than Ever

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What is Freightos and how does it operate in the freight industry?

Zvi Schreiber 0:00

It's growing the whole time, but the SaaS is not, you know, it's really an enabler for us. We're not trying to build a big SaaS business. So yes, the answer is yes, but also we don't particularly care.

Nathan Latka 0:16

You are listening to Conversations with Nathan Latka, where I sit down and interview the top SaaS founders, like Eric Wan from Zoom. If you'd like to subscribe, go to getlatka.com. We've published thousands of these interviews, and if you want to sort through them quickly by revenue or churn, CAC, valuation, or other metrics, the easiest way to do that is to go to getlatka.com and use our filtering tool. It's like a big Excel sheet for all of these podcast interviews. Check it out right now at getlatka.com. Hello, everyone. My guest today is V Schreiber. He's the founder and CEO of Freytos. Freytos is the digital platform of the booking platform for the half-trillion-dollar international freight industry.

Nathan Latka 0:59

The company connects airlines, ocean miners, freight boarders, manufacturers, and retailers to make international shipping digital and smooth. Previously, he was the CEO of Light Tech, acquired by GE, and founder and CEO of Unicorn, acquired by IBM and other tech startups. He's spoken widely and written many articles, including many patents. He has a PhD in computer science and is the author of Phys, which tells the history of physics as a novel soon to be published, money going out of style. V, you ready to take us to the top? Let's go. Patents, books, great logistics. You do everything, huh?

Zvi Schreiber 1:36

Like I always say, I just have a problem sitting still, so I do stuff, yeah.

Nathan Latka 1:42

Well, hey, this is great. Listen, quick update for folks that may have missed our first interview, which is back, I think, in 2018. Help people understand. Can you give a real-life example? There's an e-commerce brand in New York that sources 1,000 shoes per month from China. Where do you fit into their ecosystem?

Zvi Schreiber 2:01

Yeah. So we're a platform that connects all the players in international freight. And there's two main layers, actually. So if you're an importer, you're importing some stuff from China, then you need to arrange shipping. And typically, you'd source that from a freight forwarder. A freight forwarder is like a travel agent for cargo, right? But in the past, and even today, most times that would be done offline. You'd phone them up. You'd email them. You'd get an answer after two days. So we provide a modern website where you can get prices from multiple freight forwarders instantly, choose and book online. So it's bringing, in passenger travel, we've had this for 25 years, but we're bringing the same convenience, the same digitalization to shipping to allow the importers and the exporters to transparently choose and book freight forwarding.

Zvi Schreiber 2:50

Now, there's another layer. Once you book with a freight forwarder, they need to book online. with the airline, with the ocean liner, as well as customs brokerage and trucking and trains and all of that. But the main leg would be either ocean or air for international. And so we also provide, we have the second part of our company is called WebCargo, and that will connect the freight forward. WebCargo? WebCargo, yeah. WebCargo, it's a company we acquired five years ago now. It's an important part of our business, and that will connect the freight forwarders to the airlines and the ocean liners. And in particular, where we're seeing a lot of growth is connecting the freight forwarders to the airlines.

Zvi Schreiber 3:30

Believe it or not, until a couple of years ago, that didn't happen. Cargo was always booked on airlines. manually until very recently, but we've been able to digitalize that. And that is growing super fast. It's grown like a thousand percent in the last year. So it's been a very, very exciting ride.

Nathan Latka 3:46

Web cargo. Okay, great. And what year did you make that acquisition in?

Zvi Schreiber 3:49

2016. So it's coming up to five years.

How did COVID-19 impact Freightos and its operations?

Zvi Schreiber 3:53

Yeah, it was a great company based in Barcelona, Spain, founded by two guys, Manuela and Enrique, out of their college dorm about 12 years ago. They'd built it up purely organically to the point where they had about 1,000 freight forwarders using their software.