The adaptation process in freight tech

Kontainers’ evolution from an ocean freight booking platform to a digital front-end transformation software for carriers and forwarders was part of the plan, according to its founders.    It isn’t uncommon for a young technology company to go through a few iterations before it hits upon a business model that works.
   The path to success in software is littered with such cases, some driven by adaptive founders, others by investors that want the company they’ve supported to forge a different path.
   These winding roads toward success sometimes happen by chance, and sometimes there’s a plan behind the apparent indecision.
   I’ve come across a few cases over the last year where technology companies focusing on the container shipping industry have given the market a sort of headfake. And the most recent one is that of Kontainers, a U.K.-based software provider.
   If you’ve read anything about Kontainers over the past couple years, those articles have most likely described the company as either: a digital freight forwarder; booking.com for the liner shipping industry; or a freight forwarding marketplace. I referred to Kontainers as a “digital freight forwarding platform” (whatever that means) as recently as August in an article in American Shipper.
   I’ve had several briefings over the last year with Graham Parker, co-founder and chief executive officer of Kontainers, and in the most recent, he pulled back the curtain on where the company has landed today after its own winding journey.
   Parker said Kontainers is a multi-tenant software provider to freight forwarders and liner carriers. The company is targeting the world’s biggest players in both markets with a simple approach: quickly provide those companies with a front-end digital product that lets them simplify the international shipping process and thus compete better for customers. The company counts among its customers a top five liner carrier and a top 20 global forwarder.
   “We would get asked all the time, ‘are you competing with Flexport?’” Parker said. “We’re not competing with Flexport, we’re equipping companies to compete with Flexport. We’re not a digital forwarder or a marketplace. We don’t have rates. We build a bespoke branded platform for each company we work with.”
   Kontainers’ system is designed with two primary things in mind: ease of use and time savings.
   Last year, Parker wrote blog entries describing how many people didn’t understand what his company did. And that lack of understanding was partially because Kontainers was still evolving, purposefully, to where it hopes to be. In that time, his company worked with shippers to understand buying behavior online, and it might have easily looked as if Kontainers was a neutral platform meant to streamline the ocean freight process (logistics and customs) on behalf of shippers.
   Parker would likely argue that’s still the case, that Kontainers is now trying to streamline those processes through the cipher of forwarding or carrier software.
   “We felt like we never went live,” he said “We wanted to learn. You know these big brands, but you don’t know how they behave digitally. But the goal all along was to have a multi-tenancy product.”
   In many ways, Kontainers has taken a similarly patient, studious approach to building its product as Haven, though the plot twist is entirely in reverse. Whereas Haven created a freight marketplace to understand shipper behavior to refine an automated transportation management system for shippers, Kontainers took that time to learn so that it could build an automated system for service providers.
   The market for freight forwarding software is not uncrowded. Aside from the aforementioned areas where startups are most likely to play (as digital-first forwarders or as creators of neutral or curated marketplaces), there are entrenched providers such as WiseTech Global, Descartes and BluJay Solutions, among many others.
   Parker said he sees his platform playing nice with those types of systems, though. Kontainers would essentially act as the customer-friendly front-end to the back-office heavy lifting that, say, a WiseTech Global offers through its enterprise software.
   Kontainers, as with many of the startups changing the face of freight, relies on application programming interfaces (APIs) to integrate its system with existing ones.
   “Ninety percent of our software is customer facing, whereas 90 percent of CargoWise (WiseTech Global’s flagship forwarding product) is back office,” he said. “We’re totally complementary.”
   Parker has designs on landing more heavy hitters in both the forwarding and carrier spaces this year, and the pitch is pretty simple. As he wrote in a recent blog, digitally focused forwarders have a major edge on traditional forwarders when it comes to valuations, simply because there’s a belief that more business will eventually migrate to digital platforms, and that those platforms will be more economically efficient.
   Like many young tech companies, the path has been winding, but Parker is hoping he and his company have timed the embrace of technology like his right.
   “If you think you’re going to lose business to a company that’s focused on digital forwarding, that’s where our unique position lies.”