How Freightos CEO Zvi Schreiber grew Freightos to $15.4M revenue and 2K customers in 2024.

hello everyone my guest today is v schreiber he's the founder and ceo of freitas freitas is the digital platform of the booking platform for the half trillion dollar international freight industry 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 fired 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 as a phd in computer sciences the author of fizz which tells the history of physics as a novel soon to be published money going out of style and there's soon to be published money going out of style v you're ready to take to the top let's go patents books great logistics you do everything huh yeah like i always uh say i just cut you know just have a problem sitting still so so i do stuff yeah yeah well hey this is great listen quick quick update for folks that may have missed our first interview which is back i think in 2018 um help people understand can you give a real life example you know there is a uh there's an e-commerce brand in new york that sources a thousand shoes per month from china where do you fit into their ecosystem yeah so so we're a platform that connects all the players in international freight so and there's two main layers actually so if you're an importer you're importing some stuff from china then you need you need to arrange shipping uh and typically you'd source that from a freight forwarder freight forward as like a like a travel agent for for cargo right um and so 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 you know website where you can get prices from multiple freight forwarders instantly choose and book online so it's bringing you know 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 allow the importers and the exporters to transparently choose and book freight forwarding now there's another layer once you book with the freight forwarder um they need to book 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 for international and so we we also provide uh we have um the second part of our company is called web cargo and that will connect like web web cargo yeah web cargo it's a company we acquired five years ago now uh it's a you know 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 that's connecting the freight forwarders to the airlines believe it or not until a couple of years ago that didn't happen cargo was always booked on airlines manually till 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 web cargo okay great and what you make that acquisition in uh 2016. you know it's coming up to five years yeah it was a great company based in barcelona spain founded out of founded by two guys manila and enrique out of their college dorm about 12 years ago that built it up purely organically um to the point where they had about a thousand freight forwarders using their software now since we merged it's at least 2000 and um you know with our backing we've been able to transition that from being just a software business to being a real transactional platform which is growing very very fast so that's that's been a fun ride so we can't obviously skip over the last year and a half kobud was sort of introducing when it first hit what was going through your head what was happening inside at fredo's well it was yeah it was quite a roller coaster um as it's hard to remember now but in april you know this march april of last year suddenly became clear that covert was a big deal and things happened very quickly china shut its borders after chinese new year the factories didn't come back there was nothing shipping out of china and china was half of our business you know um and then the airlines worldwide got grounded so there was virtually no air cargo uh all of that happened very quickly it was a scary time we actually went through the sad process of downsizing our team a bit because we didn't know what was going to happen um having said that how many employees were you and then how did you have to let go unfortunately we went down at the time from about um roughly 240 to 200. okay um so it wasn't a huge proportion of the team but it's always very sad when you have to do that we lost some good people but we've actually now bigger than 240 and in fact in a couple of cases the same people came back and worked with us again which is great um so yeah so that was the flip side you know by the time august came around last year um retail people started shopping just as much as before in fact more than before albeit more e-commerce and less um you know high street obviously less you know uh malls but so that's good for us e-commerce is a good sector for us so um suddenly shipping volumes were actually up and breaking records and that's continued till today i mean shipping shipping is breaking new records of volumes and prices as we speak uh we track that we also provide the data feed for daily shipping prices it's called the fbx index and that's been quoted a lot in the press at the moment because the those prices are up 200 and depending on the routes 250 or more year on year um so funnily enough um as um as things recovered this has actually been a great time for shipping and a great time for our business help me understand this real quick so on fbx.freightos.com right now it says current fbx 5926 dollars up nine percent what's that mean um so that is the if you're looking at the headline i'm just pulling it up as well if you're looking at the headline figure yeah that is the average price across all trade lanes um the average price for shipping a 40-foot container on any long haul so it could be china to america china to uh europe transatlantic and then we break it down by trade lanes but that's just the average price um you know worldwide for for shipping a 44 container which is the most common size uh to give you an idea a year ago that was a thousand three hundred dollars um so so that's like triples um more than tripled i'm trying to go back to pre-cover the first thing go back in your chart is june 2019 which is 13 17. um which i guess that was pre-coded right i guess that was yeah it wasn't yeah yeah um exactly so so even kobe didn't really make a blip in these prices when i look at the 2020 time period on here they sort of fluctuate between 1400 and sort of 2200 what's driven the massive increase in in the cost of this you know really in the last six months january 2021 to the day well first of all to be fair that that's more than a blip you know going up from 1400 to 200 is in itself a very nice increase of almost 50 percent so so covid um you know the second half of lost you did have a positive impact it did drive prices up uh but as you say not nearly as dramatically as we've had in the last half year it's interesting there's been a combination of factors first of all retail remains strong even as people spend less money on restaurants and services they're spending more money on goods so retail remains strong and then you've had these these various events you had the sewers canal blockage that created a lot of stress on a system which was already at full capacity uh just in the last couple of weeks you've had a major covert outbreak at the yantean port in south china uh 25 of the goods that shipped from china to the us ship out of yantian and that port is down its capacity is down 70 because there was an outbreak of cobit and staff got sent home and and there's a lot of ripple effects because the whole the ships were full anyway and then you get the sewers canal uh blockage you get your anti-gan outbreak um and then the ripple effects because there are something like 70 ships roughly anchored outside to come into port uh that means that you've got thousands of i mean tens of thousands of containers which are out of circulation so now there's a shortage of physical containers there the metal boxes um so the whole system is very um full and then when you have more disruptions um they just can't recover and the prices skyrocket and and as you're seeing uh fbx.com is is really where the industry tracks all of that price because we have more data than anyone else about what's happening in the pricing and this will impact uh just to be clear to your listeners this is a big increase big enough that it will impact the the price of goods you know on the shelf this summer i was going to say is this a leading indicator of what we're going to see with inflation and price increases and decrease in purchasing power i mean would you argue this is the leading indicator of that yes it is yeah this is definitely a factor of inflation normally you know on average um shipping is about five percent of the price of imported good when you buy a product in the shop most of them are imported and on average uh shipping is about five percent now of course if you buy a really big cheap...