London, May 29, 2024 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) --
With technology surging ahead, the world of third-party logistics, or 3PL, is finding itself susceptible to the winds of change. And (to its own surprise) it kind of likes it.
Solvo.ai is one of a handful of startups driving this spate of change. Led by an elite team and backed by top-tier investors, Solvo.ai is attacking the seemingly simple but, in reality, mind bogglingly complicated issue that sits at the very heart of shipping itself: freight pricing.
This month, Solvo.ai onboarded two of the industry’s most respected, and high profile, veterans. Will Urban, former Chief Revenue Officer at Flexport, and Peter Hove Hildebrandt, who served as Global Head of Revenue Management at shipping behemoth Maersk where he helped launch its SPOT product, have joined Solvo.ai as advisors.
Given Mr. Urban and Mr. Hildebrandt’s respective pedigrees, industry watchers are likely to take notice. But it’s the price optimization engine at the heart of the company that has industry influencers talking.
For all of its long history, shipping has worked on a cost-plus model. Freight forwarders and their customers negotiate a price and, aside from some surcharge exceptions, that’s where the story ends. (At least until the next quarterly or annual negotiation.) The result is that money gets left on the table in the form of default pricing that’s often lower or higher than what the market is willing to pay at any given moment.
“The shipping industry is acutely aware that the time for real change and serious innovation is now,” said Mr. Urban. “Freight forwarders in particular need practical solutions whose impact goes straight to the bottom line. Solvo.ai’s price optimization engine cuts right to the heart of virtually everything vital in third party logistics.”
Solvo.ai has set out to change this by turning static pricing into a dynamic process of optimization. Considering the enormous number of factors that go into creating a dynamic pricing model, Solvo.ai’s technology has only recently become possible because of recent leaps, particularly in AI.
Solvo.ai is led by CEO Gaurav Bajaj, a former executive at Cambridge-based technology company Secondmind, and CTO Dr. Dongho Kim, a co-founder at Secondmind who previously developed systems that became part of Apple’s Siri. Bajaj and Kim came together around a shared dedication to building resiliencies into massive systems, like shipping.
Other members of the Solvo.ai team have come from The Freightos Group, cargo.one, Tive, Kuehne+Nagel and DHL, bringing logtech and traditional freight experience—a critical factor as the company works to shake up pricing.
With Solvo.ai, freight forwarders—whose work is shaped by an array of thorny decisions about how price, and quotations, impact their wider company objectives—get data-driven recommendations on the many critical decisions they make each day.
Like so many technology companies shaking up major industries, Solvo.ai (it comes from “to solve” in Latin) has staked its own future on its ability to innovate exactly where its core customers—freight forwarders responsible for circulating millions of tons of cargo each year—need it most.
“What drew me to this team is that they are looking at the world from the perspective of their customers, freight forwarders,” said Mr. Hildebrandt.
“In a space where ambitious tech companies churn out technically amazing solutions whose application is unclear, this really sets Solvo.ai apart.”
