Shipping intelligence firm FreightFlows said it has launched a Predictive Maritime Intelligence Platform focused on predicting near-term commercial ship operations. The launch coincides with the close of a $1.8 million seed round, led by Motion Ventures and with participation from Newark Venture Partners, Allied Venture Partners, SaaS Ventures, Launchpad Venture Group and TecPier.
Matt Morgan, FreightFlows' founder and CEO, said “Now more than ever, participants in the global supply chain have felt the pressure of digitalization, transparency and coordination throughout the value chain. What is lacking is a method for companies to take advantage of the promise of greater efficiency and opportunity that doesn’t threaten their competitiveness.”
“As is evident by the recent blockage of the Suez Canal, unprecedented congestion at ports and prices in a constant state of flux,” Morgan continued. “The global supply chain is in dire need of a solution to bridge the gap between a customer’s proprietary knowledge, and what’s actually happening in the moment.”
Morgan has spent his career in enterprise tech, maritime tech and advanced analytics. Prior to starting FreightFlows, he ran Product for Genscape, a commodities market intelligence company acquired by Wood Mackenzie in 2019. Previously he co-founded Weft, a supply chain visibility company that was acquired by Genscape in 2016.
FreightFlows provides data products and business intelligence to analyze historical ship behavior and predict the near-term commercial operations of the global fleet of container, wet and dry bulk vessels. These predictions are derived from cutting-edge geospatial analysis, machine learning, and big data modeling. FreightFlows said it enables customers to leverage predictive decision-making that greatly impacts overall ship utilization, more favorable freight rates, and unrivaled transparency.
“Freightflows is tackling a massive problem in a huge market – forecasting supply and demand in bulk shipping. Their data analytics platform offers unparalleled near-term market predictions,” comments Tim Reinsch, Managing Partner at TecPier.
Now focused on building up its global maritime database, Freightflows is serving up a customizable client data platform, and will use the recent investment to expand its product offerings to include ship-level predictive cargo data. Doing so will allow FreightFlows to move from a predictive model to a prescriptive model and will lay the foundation for artificial intelligence in the commercial markets, the company said.
"FreightFlows supply and demand forecasting in shipping will not only address some of the deepest inefficiencies in maritime, but also provide transparency across importers and exporters to make better strategic decisions like shipment planning to improve vessel utilization and optimize for global resiliency across the supply chain,” said Shaun Hon, General Partner at Motion Ventures.
