Marcus Rodrigues, Lucas Moreno and Elio Santos Jr, founders of ElloX: technology to modernize ports (Hugo Hora/Disclosure)
Solving global freight logistics impasses through technology. This is the mission of ElloX, a startup founded in Santos, in 2018, which has just received a contribution of 3 million reais from KPTL. One of the main investment managers in Venture Capital in the country, KPTL ends the investment cycle of Fundo Criatec 3, totaling 36 investee companies from the most varied sectors.
The pandemic has turned foreign trade upside down. As of 2020, the global flow of cargo and containers has encountered impasses and bottlenecks like never before. As a result, the value of freight services soared, impacting the entire production chain and prices for the final consumer. ElloX works precisely to solve this problem.
It is a Software as a Service (Saas) that helps exporters and importers in the management of the logistic operations necessary for their activity. The objective with the investment is to invest in the new Freight Broker Digital business, as the online solutions are called for budgeting sea freight, contracting customs clearance.
In ElloX’s system, the presentation of service prices works in real time, and today the market generally takes up to four days to return to customers.
“Maritime logistics is still very inefficient in several aspects. The ElloX team, with its deep knowledge of how ports work, is creating technologies that will transform the way this sector operates”, says Renato Pavan, Head of Investments at KPTL.
“We have heard reports from some of the largest Brazilian exporters telling us about exchanging thousands of emails a day to conduct their operations. With ElloX software, all this happens with much more organization and intelligence on top of the data”, says Pavan.
Economist Lucas Moreno, CEO and Co-founder of ElloX, spent six years running the export terminal at the largest port in Latin America and observed many day-to-day inefficiencies to export and import cargo. “This happened both in managing the tasks and in contracting the necessary suppliers to carry them out. These are processes that are still carried out manually, with the exchange of dozens of emails and controls in spreadsheets”, he explains.
To optimize these processes, he teamed up with Elio dos Santos and Marcus Rodrigues, who together have decades of experience in the sector, and together they decided to create a digital experience in the cargo logistics chain. Among the approximately 20 clients are large agribusiness exporting companies, such as CJ Selecta, ADM do Brasil and Amaggi.
The startup profits from customs clearance processes, in addition to the intermediation of sea freight and cross-selling of the clearance itself. According to Lucas Moreno, it is a market that moves 7 trillion dollars a year worldwide, with 80 billion dollars in Brazil alone. One of the company’s main benchmarks is the US company Flexport, which raised US$1 billion in its last investment round led by Softbank, in 2019.
an outstanding case
Last October, ElloX carried out an unusual operation in Santos that is worth noting. Analyzing internal data, given the lack of containers in Brazil and the high costs of containerized sea freight, the company managed to make a type of operation called “Breakbulk” feasible.
Thus, it shipped 7000 tons of PVC – which normally should be shipped in containers – on ships that are usual for bulk cargo, such as soy, corn, wheat, bran, iron ore.
Thus, with the solution made possible by ElloX, this vessel no longer used 280 containers. It was an alternative in the face of chaos and more cargo tends to migrate to this type of operation, thus generating a reduction in demand pressure for containerized sea freight and bringing prices to normal levels.
“We hope to be a single platform for exporting and importing companies to monitor all stages of their international logistics chain, in any modal to be used and to control their suppliers. In addition, we will be a logistics mall where our customers can access other suppliers in the market, evaluating prices in real time”, says CEO Lucas Moreno.
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