Meet the UK supply chain & logistics tech companies poised for growth
Meet the UK supply chain & logistics tech companies poised for growth
The BDO Growth Programme, powered by GrowthBuilders, is the place where promising tech companies come to access the advice and connections needed for growth.
Experienced management teams with a product that is proven and validated in the market have joined BDO’s Growth Programme cohort to rapidly increase traction and scale up operations and take the opportunity to pitch products to BDO’s clients and network.
Five visionary companies in the Growth Programme’s Tech for Logistics and Supply Chain cohort set out their stalls with presentations designed to attract commercial opportunities. Here is a summary of what they said. The companies in the cohort are:
Eurosender
Eurosender uses digital technology to connect shippers and logistics companies worldwide, fulfilling a vital need as supply chains shudder under multiple shocks.
Founded in 2014, the company has—through a combination of organic and venture-capital funded growth—become one of Europe’s top logistics technology companies. It has 100 employees split 70-30 between technology and logistics tasks.
The company has demonstrated its capabilities working with one of Europe’s top tier-one automotive suppliers. “We make the complex world of logistics simpler by the application of technology,” says founder and CEO Jan Stefe. “We still see logistics is a largely pen-and-paper-driven industry,” he adds.
“The industry is still lagging far behind others, which are already fully digitalised. It’s very fragmented and hard for customers to navigate, so our goal is to build a single digital logistics dashboard.”
The company’s platform automatically selects the best options for any logistics task. This should allow customers to self-serve their logistics needs “very efficiently,” Stefe says.
Gardenia Technologies
Gardenia Technologies is looking to bring the benefits of software as a service to the logistics sector with a platform that provides advanced analytics for working capital finance optimisation and sustainability management.
Because of the siloed and manual nature of many business processes, companies “are using obsolete information to take decisions on events that are happening today, to influence tomorrow’s outcome,” says co-founder Jonathan Schneider.
“We offer a real-time analytics platform that allows businesses to increase their margins, collaborate across departments off a single source of truth, manage their working capital, build supply chain resiliency and obtain financing off the back of that.
As well as releasing cash by optimising daily payables outstanding and decreasing the cost of goods sold, for example, Gardenia helps companies reduce emissions and plan for Net Zero, allowing customers to benefit from reduced offset costs and sustainability-linked finance.
The company has grown to 15 employees and secured £2.4m since its launch in 2016. Customers include a portfolio company of the global private equity investor Advent International, for which Gardenia secured a £1.1m profit-and-loss uplift and released £41m in cash within a month.
MarineTraffic
With ocean cargo delays causing headaches for logistics managers and supply chain professionals, Greek company MarineTraffic is seeing heavy demand for its vessel and container tracking maritime analytics solutions.
MarineTraffic helps businesses get accurate, real-time data on their ocean cargo delivery dates by fusing carrier track-and-trace, vessel schedules with unmatched AIS real-time tracking data for their shipments while taking transshipments and port congestion into account.
Taiwan’s top semiconductor manufacturer has used MarineTraffic’s solution to manage detention and demurrage costs while saving time and money through improved production planning.
MarineTraffic, which has grown organically to 180 employees since launching in 2014, also counts global giants such as Amazon, Bollore Logistics and Unilever among its 100,000 clients worldwide.
“MarineTraffic is the world’s leading provider of ship tracking and maritime analytics,” says Joseph Tan, the company’s Supply Chain InTransit Visibility Sales Manager. “Our key is to provide transparency into the shipping industry.”
Soleadify
Recent supply chain headaches have taught logistics and procurement managers the value of being able to source alternative suppliers quickly. This is a challenge that Romanian tech company Soleadify aims to address with its next-generation supplier discovery and intelligence data platform.
Riyaz Nakhooda, Vice President of Customer Solutions at Soleadify, cites a study by Wakefield Research that shows 93% of procurement leaders have experienced the negative effects of misinformation or confusing data about suppliers, often involving financial loss.
“This is where Soleadify comes in,” he says. “We proactively discover and profile manufacturers, services and distributors in real time and we provide an enriched data stream into any procurement platform.”
Soleadify’s platform holds details of 3 million manufacturers and 10 million service providers and distributors across 200 countries, roughly five times the coverage of any other provider, Nakhooda says. “We also have very high quality within our data,” he says.
Only founded in 2018, the company has already attracted funding to the tune of £1.2m and grown to 35 employees.
Workhorse
Small-to-medium enterprise (SME) order and inventory management specialist Workhorse has secured £1.7m in funding since launching in Dorking, UK, in 2017. “The reason we are having success at the moment is software is failing those SMEs,” says CEO Alastair Badman.
“These SMEs have duplication of data, silos of information within the business, so that only one person becomes the lynchpin for a process or an activity, [plus] there’s a lack of clear, easy-to-access reporting and there are too many manual time-consuming processes,” he says.
Workhorse aims to remedy the situation by providing visibility of key data, control over operations and time and cost savings through the removal of manual effort. “We are not unique—there are other ways to solve these problems,” Badman admits. “But we’re not just a technology product.”
The Workhorse offering includes an onboarding team to ensure customers get value from the platform, which can be personalised for businesses and individual users. Furthermore, “Workhorse can be extended to cover 100% of business needs,” adds Badman.
These are just five of 16 technology companies selected for the BDO Growth Programme because of their potential for growth. The programme, launched in April 2022, focuses on three themes: the future of work, innovation in regulatory technology, and transforming logistics and supply chains.
To find out more, read the Growth Programme brochure.
MATTHEW GILMOUR ►
Growth Programme Lead
BDO London - Baker Street