Why GV invested in Terminal49:
Investing in the future of ocean terminal visibility
We are excited to announce our recent investment in Terminal49. We are joining lead investor, Stage 2 Capital in Terminal 49’s $6.5M Series A round, along with a number of existing investors who also participated.
The past three years have exposed the challenges a rigid, inefficient, and manual supply chain causes to the public. Manual efforts to track thousands of containers through hundreds of terminals and dozens of carriers leads to slow decision-making, high costs, and a frustrating experience for companies AND customers whose shipments and packages have yet to arrive.
Terminal49’s initial focus was on drayage. Their software eliminated the manual container tracking that truckers, importers, and brokers were forced to do in order to run their operations. The first version of their platform focused on reducing demurrage and per-diem charges by improving the overall container delivery process with automated container tracking and faster collaboration. Over time, Akshay Dodeja, Terminal49’s CEO and co-founder, observed how everyone involved in the supply chain — suppliers, cargo owners, customs brokers, freight forwarders, trucking companies — were relying on often-outdated milestone updates that they seek across dozens of steamship lines and terminal websites. In 2020, T49 doubled down on its container tracking software and released its initial ocean freight visibility dashboard and API. They built it on top of tight integrations with carriers and terminals, consolidating the data and making it more accessible both for supply chain software developers (via API) as well as supply chain operations teams (via a portal).
Terminal 49’s delivers its Ocean Freight Visibility Platform to shipping and container managers via a combination of powerful, real-time tracking APIs as well as intuitive online dashboards. Terminal49 pulls container status and milestone events from every ocean carrier and US/Canada port or terminal, standardizes the data, and then pushes it to their customers — helping those customers automate their workflows, increase time efficiency, and save money.
Below are the key reasons why Grand Ventures invested in Terminal49:
Market: In recent years, massive disruptions within the $10B Trillion global logistics industry have driven increased investor funding within the supply chain technology sector, nearly doubling from 2020 to 2021, reaching $37 billion for the year. Historically, the global logistics industry has lagged in technology adoption and relied heavily on manual processes, good old-fashioned paperwork, and often under the best of circumstances, spreadsheets. T49’s Ocean and Terminal container APIs enable logistics companies to automate manual processes, which are often time-consuming and prone to human error.
While other competitors provide similar features, many have focused on trucking and shipping visibility, leaving ocean and terminal container visibility open for a new category king. Our conversations with Terminal 49’s customers, a number of which fall into the category of the largest shippers in the world, indicated that Terminal49’s data quality and low data latency were best-of-breed. At Grand Ventures, we invest in companies with the potential to lead in their category, and Terminal49 is already doing that.
Product: As the most comprehensive container tracking solution in the market, we were excited by Terminal49’s focus on software development friendly rich APIs as well as their supplemental reports and dashboards. Their technology has helped them achieve a #1 ranking on Google for Container Tracking API. At Grand Ventures, we’re looking for the companies that are innovating within the supply chain technology space. Terminal49’s focus on building developer friendly custom chain applications and APIs fits directly within the nexus of two GV investments areas — Supply chain software and DevOps / Developer Tooling.
Team: Very early in the process, when we met with Akshay (CEO), Matt (CTO) and the entire T49 team, we got excited. They were a textbook example of how a small (sub 10 FTEs when we met them), high performance team, can drive tremendous growth in terms of ARR, customer count, as well as high profile “mega” customers — all while doing it in a capital efficient manner.
Looking Ahead
Terminal49 will leverage the Series A funding to continue expanding its platform, adding more integrations for transportation management systems, as well as expanding the depth of its data integrations with leading shipping terminals in North America, Europe, South America, and Asia.
We share in Akshay’s excitement to be a part of Terminal49’s journey and are optimistic about growth of this market and the opportunity for Terminal49 to lead it. We are also looking forward to working with our friends at Stage 2 Capital, Initialized, Afore Capital, and others to help Terminal49 to deliver on their vision for streamlining global trade, making supply chains more resilient, and driving down the cost of imports.
Note: We’re actively looking for new Supply Chain / Logistics software companies as a foundation in GVII. If you’re a founder in the Supply Chain / Logistics software company or a VC looking at deals in the space, let’s connect!
