The Amazon CEO and world’s richest man Jeff Bezos together with other prominent investors participated in Series A fundraising worth $15 million for the UK startup Beacon.
Jeff Bezos, Amazon CEO, was among the top investors in a Series A fundraising meant for a U.K. based digital freight forwarding and supply chain finance startup Beacon. The startup is aiming at focusing on further investment in technology, people and also market expansion.
Beacon, which is led by CEO Fraser Robinson and COO Dmitri Izmailov, was founded in 2018, whereby both were Uber executives. Later on, Pierre Martin from Amazon joined the Beacon management as the CTO, hence bringing on board a strong management logistics team.
On the list of investors who took part in the Series A fundraising was the leading U.S. venture capital firm BVC. According to the company, it is backed up by some of the most experienced investors globally including leading venture capital funds like Neo and 8VC. Notably, among its c-level executives come from Google LLC (NASDAQ: GOOGL) (NASDAQ: GOOG), Uber Technologies Inc (NYSE: UBER) and also from Amazon.com Inc (NASDAQ: AMZN), hence able to solve most challenging logistics in the supply chain.
Research has shown that the freight forwarding and supply chain finance industries have an estimated value of $1 trillion and $12 trillion respectively. However, most of the logistics companies are slow to digitize their process with 30% of the shipping companies able to satisfy the customer. As a result, it creates a huge gap for Beacon to fill.
Why Jeff Bezos Invested in Beacon
In the past two years, Beacon has been able to establish a significant number of customers, with a promise of a growing number in the next quarters. It might explain why the leading dollar billionaire Bezos is eyeing on investing in the start-up.
Beacon uses among the best available AI, search optimization, data science and also cloud networks to streamline operational efficiencies. Besides, it can combine the real-time view of global delivery cargo and marketplace view of global shipping cost and also prices.
“Beacon has attracted investment from some of the best minds in business and technology. The traditional freight forwarder model remains surprisingly analogue, using systems and processes that are slow and inefficient, with opaque pricing and limited use of technology Our goal is to disrupt the trillion-dollar freight forwarding market by vastly improving the experience of for importers with a more transparent and smarter shipping product. We can also believe that our ability to offer supply chain finance can be transformed for our customers by allowing them to better control and manage their cash flow,” said Beacon co-founder and CEO Fraser Robinson.
“With digitalization accelerating globally as a result of COVID-19, we believe the future of traditional freight forwarder is more precarious than ever.” He concluded.
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