Cargo.one gets $18.6M to take its air freight booking platform over the pond

Published July 27, 2020

Berlin -based cargo.one, which runs a marketplace for booking air freight, has closed an $18.6 million Series A round of funding led by Index Ventures.

Next47 and prior backers Creandum, Lufthansa Cargo and Point Nine Capital also participated in the round, along with a number of angel investors — including Tom Stafford of DST Global and Carlos Gonzalez-Cadenas (COO of GoCardless and former chief product officer of Skyscanner).

The August 2017-founded startup says it’s seen bookings rise during the coronavirus crisis travel crunch as airlines seek alternatives to selling seats to passengers.

Over the past 12 months the startup says it’s scaled GMV by 10x and is expecting continued fast-paced growth as COVID-19 accelerates the adoption of digital distribution in air cargo.

The new funding will go on expanding the business, with the team aiming to increase the number of airlines signed up — including beefing up coverage in Europe. Cargo.one is also targeting expanding into North America and Asia — planning to triple headcount to 70 staff by the end of the year via an aggressive hiring drive.

Currently it has 12 airlines signed up to use the platform to book in freight shipments, including Lufthansa, All Nippon Airways, Finnair, Etihad, AirBridgeCargo and TAP Air Portugal. It launched the booking product two summers ago, with Lufthansa Cargo as the first airline signed up.

“Cargo.one is a two-sided marketplace, connecting airlines with forwarders of all sizes,” says co-founder and MD Oliver Neumann, discussing the business model. “We receive a commission fee from the airlines for selling their air freight capacities on our platform. For freight forwarders the access to the booking platform is free.”

The platform offers real-time visibility of available air freight across covered airlines and routes — aiming to replace what can be an arduous process of phone and/or email back and forth for its target users (freight-forwarding offices).

Airlines set prices for air freight products sold via cargo.one .

“The air cargo market has been stuck in the ’90s when compared to the passenger business. The vast majority of air cargo to this day is booked by calling the airlines directly. Many processes are still manual and time-consuming,” says Neumann, who describes the product as “more than just a booking platform.”

“We design, build and maintain custom integrations to our airline partners, creating both the front end for freight forwarders and integrating into the systems of the airlines and helping them improve the back-end infrastructure. That’s why we refer to it as the operating system for air cargo.”

“At cargo.one we are building a 100% digital solution and enable airlines to transform their business digitally. Over the past years, cargo.one has built tailored technical integrations with airline partners that enable them to distribute their capacity online without the need to overhaul their infrastructure,” he adds.

Currently, cargo.one’s platform has some 1.1 million+ air freight offers per month, covering 120+ countries and 300 airports globally.

On the customer side it has more than 1,500 freight-forwarding offices signed up at this point — which it touts as including “21 of the top 25 companies globally.”

“From January to June 2020, cargo.one saw the number of air cargo search requests by freight forwarders quadruple. In response to increased demand from airlines and freight forwarders, we expect to triple the size of the business by the end of the year,” adds Neumann.

Index’s Martin Mignot and Max Rimpel led the Series A investment in cargo.one.

Commenting on the funding in a statement, Mignot, said: “cargo.one has formed close partnerships with major global airlines, who have subsequently seen their cargo business expand significantly. Conversations with dozens of other airlines in the Americas and Asia show the clear need for a simple booking engine for air cargo, and early signs of the far-reaching impact it will have on the airline industry and businesses around the world who rely on it to serve their customers.”

Venture capital has been pouring into the logistics space over the past decade, chasing an increasing number of startups spotting opportunities to apply digital efficiencies to the movement of physical goods — including aiming to replace freight forwarders themselves, in the case of another Berlin logistics startup, FreightHub, which raised a $30 million Series B last year for a logistics play that covers sea, air and rail freight.

Pachama launches to support global reforestation through carbon markets

Published January 3, 2020

The world’s forests are ablaze, under threat from illegal logging and disappearing due to the less dramatic environmental degradation wrought by drought and other signs of climate change.

It’s part of the negative feedback loop that seems to be accelerating climate change as greenhouse gases accumulate in the atmosphere, but one startup company is trying to facilitate reforestation by supporting carbon offsets that specifically target the world’s flora.

Pachama has raised $4.1 million to create a marketplace where companies can support carbon offset projects. The company is backed by some big names in tech investment, like former Uber executive Ryan Graves, through his private investment firm, Saltwater, and Chris Sacca, a prominent early investor in Uber, through his Lowercase Capital firm.

Founded by Diego Saez-Gil, a serial entrepreneur whose last company was a startup selling a “smart-suitcase,” Pachama is aiming to bring reforestation projects to the carbon markets whose impacts can be independently verified by the company’s monitoring software to ensure their ability to offset emissions.

“We were making a smart connected suitcase which got banned,” says Saez-Gil. “After that I decided to take some time off and I was quite burnt out. I wanted to do some soul searching and tried to decide what I wanted to put my efforts [into].”

He traveled to South America and did a trip through the Amazon rain forest in Peru. It was there that Saez-Gil saw the effects of deforestation in an area that represents a huge carbon dioxide offset for the planet.

“There are about 1 billion hectares on the planet that could be reforested,” says Saez-Gil.

That opportunity — to contribute to the perpetuation of independently validated carbon markets around the world — is what convinced investors like Paul Graham, Justin Kan, Daniel Kan, Gustaf Alströmer, Peter Reinhardt, Jason Jacobs and Chris Sacca from Lowercase Capital, as well as funds such as Social+Capital, Global Founders Capital and Atomico, to contribute to the company’s $4.1 million funding.

It’s a pretty big consortium to finance what amounts to a small capital commitment (given the size of the funds under management that these investors have at their disposal), but investors are right to be a little wary.

Carbon markets are driven by policy, and policymakers have been reluctant to draft legislation that would put a high enough price on carbon emissions to make those markets viable.

“Pachama’s carbon credit marketplace is launching at a pivotal moment when awareness of the climate crisis is reaching an all-time high, and businesses are increasingly looking to become carbon neutral,” said Ryan Graves, Pachama’s lead investor and new director said in a statement. “What attracted me to Pachama was the company’s use of technology to bring trust to an industry that desperately needs it, and gives the verifiable results to the purchasers of carbon credits.”

Awareness doesn’t equal political action, however, and Pachama needs the political will of both governments and consumers to move the needle on creating viable carbon trading markets.

Pachama’s business becomes profitable only when the price of carbon moves beyond $15 per ton of carbon dioxide (or similar emissions) offset. Currently, there are only two markets in the world where that threshold has been reached — the California market and Europe, according to Saez-Gil.

For Pachama’s founder, forest preservation and reforestation projects can have outsized benefits. “There are only 500 forest projects that are certified today… we need tens of thousands,” says Saez-Gil. “There are one billion hectares on the planet available for reforestation without competing with agriculture.”

The restoration of native forests can contribute to replenishing global biodiversity, and captures more carbon than cultivating forests for industrial use, but both are better than destruction to grow row crops or support animal husbandry, Saez-Gil says.

Pachama sources projects that are approved by existing certification bodies, but offers its customers monitoring and management services through access to satellite imagery and sensors that provide information on emissions and carbon capture on reforested land.

It’s a potential solution to the problem of deforestation that’s plaguing countries like Brazil. “The government in Brazil, they want to generate income for the country,” says Saez-Gil. If carbon markets paid as much as ranching, it would reduce the need for animal husbandry and plantation farming in Brazil, Indonesia or places like Peru.

Today, most investments in reforestation projects are done through middlemen, which increases opacity and the chance that projects are being double-counted or sold, according to Saez-Gil. Pachama has a person who is contacting forest project developers so that they can list the projects independently. Then the company verifies the offsets with satellite imaging systems.

The company currently has 23 forest projects — three in the Amazon rain forest in Brazil and Peru and projects in the U.S. in California, Vermont, New Jersey, Connecticut and Maine .

Saez-Gil has high hopes for the future of carbon markets based on demand coming, in part, from new regulations like those imposed on the airline industry.

“Airlines will have to offset part of their emissions as part of CORSIA,” says Saez-gil. That’s an offset of 160 million tons of emission per year. “There is all this demand coming for different offsets for different markets that will make the price go up.”