Sep 8, 2021

Portcast, an AI-powered logistics business located in Singapore, said today that it has raised US $3.2 million in pre-Series A funding led by Imperial Venture Fund. Imperial Venture is a $20 million joint venture between Newtown Partners and Imperial, a South African logistics firm. Wavemaker Partners, TMV, and Innoport were among those that took part in the round. Portcast intends to utilize the additional financing to accelerate worldwide expansion, expand team size, improve product quality, and transition from predictive to prescriptive AI. New product features such as order-level visibility and scenario planning are also on the way, according to the firm. Portcast, founded in 2018 by Nidhi Gupta, provides an easy SaaS platform and APIs for global freight forwarders and manufacturers to correctly anticipate air and ocean cargo flows and forecast daily demand. Portcast helps its clients gain real-time insight, decrease operational expenses, and improve customer experience, all while increasing supply chain profitability, by utilizing proprietary machine learning algorithms and real-time external market data. The firm claims to have anticipated the arrival times of over 90% of ships across the world, as well as demand for over 30,000 trade routes (both air and sea) daily. According to Gupta, historic delays, unparalleled port congestion, and capacity constraints have resulted in high global supply chain transportation costs. This results in a loss of revenue for the end-user and a lack of service dependability. “We believe that companies with predictive visibility on cargo movements have a significantly higher preparedness to downstream planning and customer service,” said Gupta. “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.” For our customers, the technology translates to a 20% decrease in overall port costs and an 80% reduction in manual labour, according to Gupta. “Portcast has proven its technology not just in the long-haul routes, but also in multi-port voyages and emerging economies, which are harder to predict,” said Llew Claasen, managing partner at Newtown Partners. “We believe the technology has global replicability in automating logistics workflows and digitisation.” Portcast got US$758,000 in initial investment from Wavemaker and SGInnovate prior to the newest round. SHARE