We're really excited today to announce that we’ve led the $17 million Series A round for 7bridges - the UK based value optimisation software for logistics. Existing investors Crane and LocalGlobe also participated, as well as new investor Maersk Growth.
7bridges is a company we've had on our radar for a little over a year, as part of our thematic coverage of innovation in supply chain software. Most shippers right now are facing immense logistical challenges as a combination of i) Covid related disruptions, ii) a changing regulatory landscape (e.g. Brexit) and iii) a structural shortage of logistics suppliers to meet rising demand. Together this is driving significant increases in shipping costs, delays and operational challenges. Thankfully, these can partly be addressed by technology.
Before founding the company together in 2017, Phil Ashton (CEO) and Matei Beremski (CTO) were both working in logistics data analytics and optimisation (at World Courier and IBM respectively). In these roles they witnessed the challenges of shippers first hand and were inspired to create 7bridges. Today, the 7bridges software suite is used by some of the leading shippers in ecommerce, retail and pharma such as Clinigen, Philipp Plein and Peak Design to help them optimise value of their logistics cost and operations from supply chain simulations, invoice reconciliation, cost benchmarking and more. ROI is often as high as 5x+ with a quick time to value which is impressive.
We were really inspired by Phil and Matei’s vision to create and democratise access to a new category of value optimisation software for logistics. They have productised the work historically done by logistics consultants, a service reserved only for the largest shippers. While the market awareness of the category is low, the addressable opportunity is large given the growing spend on logistics globally combined with a lack of tools and knowledge how to optimise it. As the mindshare among shippers to optimise their logistics spend increases, we believe it will become a large and established category over time.
We are thrilled to have partnered with the 7bridges team on this journey and we're excited to work together to give every shipper the tools to become an expert in value based logistics.