Logistics and the movement of freight from point A to B (and C and beyond) is one of the more antiquated, and less-understood, aspects of the world of commerce. But one look at Amazon and how it has grown its empire on the strength of its logistics prowess (and another glance or two at the companies that have fallen down on supply and shipment costs and issues), and you can see just how much of a cornerstone it is for a business to get right. Today, a Berlin-based startup called Sennder is announcing a significant round of funding to take on that antiquated logistics market with an updated, digital platform. It has raised a Series C of $70 million, with a valuation that we understand is in the region of $300 million.

The funding — led by Lakestar with participation from Accel, Next47, H14, HV Holtzbrinck Ventures, Project A and Scania Growth Capital — is notable in that it’s the second round that Sennder has raised this year alone. (It announced a Series B of $30 million this past spring.) That underscores the current surge of investor and market interest in logistics, which is estimated to be a $400 billion market in Europe alone.

Other big funding rounds in the market have included others that compete directly with Sennder in the area of freight forwarding, such as Flexport out of the U.S. bagging an investment from SoftBank at a $3.2 billion valuation; Zencargo out of the U.K. raising $20 million; and FreightHub raising $30 million. In the wider market of logistics, Bringg has raised $25 million and NEXT is raising $97 million.

That speaks to a very crowded market, which is where Sennder’s specialization comes into play. Its focus specifically is on one part of the market called the “full truck load” (FTL) market, which is aimed at organising, logging and optimising the cargo that lorry drivers are packing up onto their pallets, with a specific focus on smaller and mid-size trucking companies.

It’s an area that is estimated to be valued at $120 billion in Europe alone. As with other startups in logistics, the aim is to bring cloud-based communications and better record keeping, along with more efficient logistical mapping organization, to an industry that has been operating largely by way of faxed or shipped invoices and even, in some cases, handshakes.

In the case of Sennder, that includes not just better communication between truckers, those shipping the goods and those receiving them, but GPS tracking to help with arrivals estimates and invoicing between truckers and shippers. Given its emphasis on small and medium trucking companies, it often works directly with the owners of the trucks themselves.

“We have pooled our knowledge and experience gathered in our previous roles to improve operational excellence in this highly complex market. Our relentless focus on product and industry pain points has helped us to deliver an impressive portfolio of global, highly satisfied enterprise clients,” said David Nothacker, who co-founded the company with Nicolaus Schefenacker and Julius Koehler, in a statement. “We believe that sennder is leading the way for the industry on digitisation, reliability and customer service.”

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Sennder raises M on 0M valuation to take on the freight-forwarding industry

PayMate, a Mumbai-based startup that helps businesses automate and digitize their payments, is raising $25 million in a new round, its founder said, as it looks to expand its presence within India and in international markets.

In an interview with TechCrunch, Ajay Adiseshann, founder and CEO of PayMate, said the startup has already raised a substantial amount of the $25 million it is eyeing in its Series D. These funds came from Recruit Strategic Partners, Brand Capital, Visa and existing investor Mayfair 101. Adiseshann said he expects the round to close in 60 days.

The 13-year-old startup, which had raised $18 million prior to the Series D, began its journey as a consumer-facing payments service. But it quickly shifted its attention to opportunities in the business-to-business payments market, Adiseshann said.

PayMate today develops and offers cloud-based solutions for SME and enterprise customers to help them manage invoices and payments from vendors and customers. It also works with Visa and issuing banks to offer crediting financial options to customers.

Last year, PayMate acquired Z2P Technologies, a startup that offers lending technologies, to bring a lending stack on its platform. It looks at transactional data on its platform to score SMEs and offer them credits from third-party lenders. PayMate also serves as a discounting marketplace, allowing large enterprises to electronically negotiate offers with SMEs.

In India, and the same is true of some other markets, small and medium businesses often struggle to secure financing options from major banks. “India is very collateral-based in financing. On our platform, we have the visibility of their transactional data,” he said. This helps establish transparency and trust between all the stakeholders.

The startup has more than 35,000 business customers that use its platform to process more than $5 billion in payments each year. It began operations in UAE earlier this year and will use the new capital to expand in Africa and parts of Europe, Adiseshann said.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Visa invests in India-based B2B payments platform PayMate’s M round

The race is on for the car of the future, equipped with self-driving capabilities, on-board personalised information and entertainment, and an ever-smaller carbon footprint. Today, however, comes news of a startup that’s improving car performance from the outside.

UVeye, a Tel Aviv-based company that has built a set of drive-through external scanners that can take images of the exterior of a vehicle (including the tires and undercarriage) and then — using computer vision and AI — instantly read those scans to detect for anomalies, has raised $31 million in funding, money that it will be using to continue expanding its technology, as well as building out the rest of its business.

Today, UVeye is already finding applications in assessing the state of rental and used cars, helping with insurance adjustments, inspecting vehicles to diagnose mechanical or other problems, and as part of wider security efforts. Its customers include car giants, their OEM partners, insurance companies, security services and governments, rental companies, on-demand ride-hailing companies, and many others in the transportation industry whose businesses are based on maintaining or inspecting vehicles.

Amir Hever, the CEO and co-founder, noted that while there are, for example, six OEMs already working with his company, there is also a long waiting list of companies that want to work with the startup. So this is part of the reason for the funding, too: to scale up and meet that demand.

The key to UVeye is that its vertically-integrated system (which includes the scanning hardware as well as the software to read and understand the scans) is fully automated. “We give accurate reports of vehicle based on AI algorithms that are very accurate and will produce consistent results every time,” said Hever. “It’s harder to do this many inspections today because they are basically human based.”

Toyota Tsusho, Volvo Cars and previous investor W. R. Berkley Corporation are leading this round, along with another returning investor, F.I.T. Ventures, and others — strategic partners that underscore the company’s progress so far, and what trajectory it would like to follow.

UVeye said that Toyota Tsusho (a member of the Toyota Group that provides a number of car-related services such as exporting, alongside non-automotive interests) will be using its technology in used car centers and the wider automotive trading market. Volvo will be rolling UVeye out in its factories, dealerships and for aftermarket support — or “whole lifecycle” management, in the words of Hever. And W. R. Berkeley, an insurance company, has been working on business models incorporating the use of UVeye’s scanning technology to help with registrations and subsequent claims, as well as those security applications.

This funding is the first significant money that the startup has raised and brings the total raised by UVeye to about $35 million. Its strategic partners include Daimler and Skoda. (Impressive to note the traction so far, in fact, on so little capital.)

“Premium quality standards are at the core of the Volvo brand and we are intrigued by the possibilities that UVeye’s technology offers,” Zaki Fasihuddin, CEO of the Volvo Cars Tech Fund said in a statement. “This type of advanced scanning technology could allow us to take the next step in quality.”

“When we made our initial investment in UVeye two years ago, we believed its system could have game-changing impact within security and inspection applications globally,” said Mike Nannizzi, director of fintech investments at W. R. Berkley Corporation, in a statement. “Today’s announcement validates that early hypothesis.  We congratulate UVeye, Toyota Tsusho and Volvo Cars for building a cohesive partnership with enormous potential.”

UVeye’s technology is aiming to replace — or at least augment — a very antiquated and analog way of inspecting cars from the outside. Typically and traditionally, inspections are done by human mechanics, who then compare their findings against previous human-made assessments to identify issues. The vehicle also needs to be completely stationary during these checks. The whole process can take hours or days.

UVeye brings that down to seconds, Hever said. Currently a car can be moving up to 20 miles per hour and still be “read” as well as a car that is stationary, with the size of cosmetic anomalies — scratches and the like — capable of being as small as 2 millimeters in size. The system continues to get optimized all the time, Hever added.

Today the company continues to focus on vertical integration — that is, UVeye manufactures all its own hardware as well as develops the software that runs on it. I asked if at any point it might be able to work with the kind of camera you might typically find on a smartphone. These are improving all the time, and they are already being used as portable computers by, for example, customer service assistants at rental agencies to check-in vehicles after they have been returned by customers.

Hever said that while this may be the case, the aim for his company is to fully automate the inspection to the point that no human would need to be involved at all in that aspect.

“The market has really improved and cameras are chaning all the time,” said Hever, “But what is unique about our solution is that we are trying to make them automated.”

So, for example, scanning points could be set up at the car rental entrance / exit point to automatically take in the car details before and after it’s been used — or equally on an assembly line of a car maker or at an inspection station for an insurance company, eliminating the need for manual operators. (This obviously presents a higher IT cost to the customer, of course, although it might be justified by reducing the number of customer service agents that need to be on the payroll, and more importantly speed up the procurement and return of cars.)

Longer term, the plan will be to continue expanding UVeye’s capabilities and applications, as well as business partners. The possibilities for what it might tackle next are very interesting:

Tapping into the rise of autonomous vehicle technologies, one area that UVeye is starting to explore is how its exterior system might better communicate with the kinds of diagnostics that a car’s own internal systems are producing, to provide even more accurate assessments of problems a car might be having. (For example, in the case of engine problems and leaks, or small cracks in some of the parts, or problems with tires.)

And UVeye’s platform could potentially include expand to scanning what might be on the inside as well as the outside. Today, a lot of this is done with x-rays but there are new technologies involving sound waves and other parameters to be able to identify and verify cargo shipments — which could take the company into other verticals around shipping and logistics, as well as become even more relevant to security inspections.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | UVeye snaps up M for its hyper-detailed, AI-based drive-thru vehicle-scanning platform