Newtown Partners portfolio company, Haulio, announced raising $7M in Series A equity financing.
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Haulio is a Singaporean asset-light managed marketplace for booking first-mile logistics and drayage services in the ASEAN region. Haulio has developed a sophisticated technology stack that digitizes the first-mile logistics process through a haulage management platform that connects shippers with a network of carriers and other stakeholders such as freight forwarders, drivers, and port operators. Haulio’s solution aims to address challenges experienced by shippers and carriers including shipment visibility, customs clearance, port congestion and operational delays, carrier capacity underutilization and antiquated technology to deliver port drayage services quickly, efficiently, and securely.
- For carriers: Haulio simplifies operational processes, streamlines jobs, and increases capacity utilization through technology.
- For shippers: Haulio aggregates first-mile logistics supply to improve visibility, and simplify fleet management, trucking and port drayage services.
Drayage is one of the most opaque, inefficient segments in the global trucking industry, dominated by small, typically undercapitalized road freight carriers using yesterday’s technology. The lack of visibility into this market contributes to inefficiency and hinders the matching of capacity and freight, driving prices up and asset utilization down. Haulio’s platform addresses the need for digitization as an enabler in this market for providing visibility, enabling optimization, and creating platforms for multi-party collaboration. With real-time visibility of carrier performance, organisations can select the best carrier service based on specific KPIs including lowest cost, lowest mileage and emissions and empty miles avoided. By streamlining the order booking communication and transportation management process, organisations can determine the most efficient and cost-effective way of moving goods through the complex first mile of the supply chain.
Newtown Partners, via the Imperial Venture Fund, formed part of the multinational investment round led by Temasek unit Heliconia Capital Management (Singapore). Other key investors in the round included Ondine Capital (China), Cornerstone Ventures (Taiwan), FuturePlay (South Korea), and corporate executives from XA Network. Existing investors including B7 Capital, ComfortDelGro, iSeed SEA, Iterative VC (United States) and PSA unboXed, also participated.
We found Haulio compelling for its proven ability to scale, processing in excess of 1 million twenty-foot equivalent units (TEU) annually internationally, a strong team with extensive logistics and supply chain visibility technology expertise, a promising pipeline of global blue-chip customers, as well as strong alignment with our port drayage and digital freight exchange investment theses. Haulio has proven the ability to digitize the first-mile drayage ecosystem; a complex process involving coordination among multiple parties with varying levels of technological limitations, through years of experience in getting this right. With constrained global supply chains and increasing multinational trade flows accelerating the need for enhanced supply chain visibility tooling, we are looking forward to working with Haulio.
