Freightos

V Shriver recognized that international freight shipping was operating like travel booking in the 1990s—manual, opaque, and inefficient. While airlines had centralized booking systems like Sabre and Amadeus that enabled platforms like Expedia to flourish, freight had no equivalent backbone. Shippers had to call freight forwarders and wait 2-3 days for price quotes. Shriver envisioned Freightos as the "Expedia for freight," making it as easy to book a container from China to the US as booking a flight.

The company was founded in 2012, but Shriver made a critical strategic decision: before launching a marketplace, he needed to build the data infrastructure that didn't exist. For four years (2012-2016), Freightos operated as a SaaS platform, selling pricing automation software to freight forwarders themselves—companies like CH Robinson, Hellmann & Panalpina, and others. This solved the chicken-and-egg problem elegantly. Instead of waiting for marketplace liquidity, Shriver engaged the supply side directly by automating their own pricing and quoting processes. By 2016, when the public marketplace launched, the freight forwarders were already equipped and ready to sell.

The sales motion was direct and consultative. Shriver built a small direct sales team (about 15 quota-carrying reps today) focused on large freight forwarders, backed by digital marketing efforts. The SaaS pitch was simple: use our platform to automate your pricing, improve your efficiency, and then reach new customers through our marketplace. The fact that Freightos was building infrastructure (data feeds, automated pricing rules) that the industry desperately needed gave them significant leverage. They didn't have to convince customers to use them; they had to convince customers to share data.

The dual revenue model—SaaS (75% of current revenue) plus marketplace (25% and growing faster)—proved remarkably effective. By the time the public marketplace went live, Freightos had already achieved 30% market share among air freight forwarders (1,500 of 10,000 total), though these represented the highest-volume operators. On the marketplace, they take a small percentage per transaction: 2-4% from sellers depending on air vs. ocean, and 3% from buyers (mostly to cover credit card processing costs). An average $2,000 ocean container shipment generates about $100 in platform revenue. The marketplace is now growing faster than the mature SaaS business, but SaaS remains the larger revenue contributor. Freightos is still capturing less than 1% of the total addressable market, leaving enormous room for growth.

Freightos has raised $95 million to date and employs nearly 300 people, with roughly 120-130 engineers. The company serves 1,500 freight forwarders on the SaaS side and thousands of buyers on the marketplace. While the top SaaS customers now pay $200,000-$400,000 annually, Shriver introduced a free tier that brought in smaller players at the bottom of the funnel. The total addressable market is roughly $400 billion (air and ocean carrier revenue combined, plus freight forwarder markup), positioning Freightos for significant growth as more of the industry moves online and digitizes.