Logistics tech start-up Portcast has completed a US$3.2 million funding round for its artificial intelligence platform used to predict estimated times of arrival of more than 90% of global ship traffic and forecast demand for over 30,000 trade routes (both air and sea) daily.
The Pre-Series A financing round was led by Newtown Partners (via the Imperial Venture Fund) with participation from Wavemaker Partners, TMV and Innoport, who join existing investors SGInnovate, among others.
The Singapore-based company says that the capital will go towards international expansion, doubling the team size, and product improvements, including support for plans to move the platform from predictive Artificial Intelligence (AI) to prescriptive AI and launch new product features such as order-level visibility and scenario planning.
“Global supply chains are under extreme pressure with record delays, unprecedented congestion at ports and constrained capacities. This has led to ridiculously high transportation costs which are being transferred to the end consumer, yet service reliability remains low,” said Nidhi Gupta, CEO and Co-Founder of Portcast.
“We believe that companies with predictive visibility on cargo movements have a significantly higher preparedness to downstream planning and customer service, and we have already seen the impact of this with reductions in overall port fees by 20% and manual work by 80% for our customers.”
“The cloud-based technology has the ability to map out the cascading effects of disruptions such as Typhoon In-fa and the Suez Canal congestion, allowing forwarders and shippers to respond and react more effectively in such scenarios.”
