In this introductory segment of a YouTube interview, the host asks the Freightos representative to explain why they joined the company and to provide a high‑level overview of Freightos as a marketplace. The representative describes Freightos as the world’s first and largest procurement platform for freight, emphasizing the massive scale of the industry: roughly $2 trillion is spent annually on moving goods, while $23 trillion worth of goods are transported worldwide each year. The founder, Zvi Schreiber, was attracted to the opportunity because of the sheer size of the market, targeting the $2 trillion freight spend as a strategic focus.
So, what led you to joining Freightos? And, you know, maybe could you give us like a high-level overview of it and a breakdown as a marketplace?
Freightos is the world's first procurement marketplace or platform, or the largest procurement platform for freight. And the concept is that there's a $2 billion, $2 Sorry, $2 trillion market of freight. Okay? So that means $2 trillion are being spent on moving goods around. And we're moving $23 trillion of goods around the world every year. Okay? And it's costing about $2 trillion. So our founder, Zvi Schreiber, likes big markets. So $2 trillion was about right for him.
Right.
And when I joined, the thought was very straightforward. Let's do an Expedia for freight, because oddly enough, when you want to book travel, you go online, you go to Expedia or Travelocity or Kiwi or whatever it is, and you can see all of the options and you can click book, you put in your credit card, and there you go. You're booked on a flight. If you want to move a container or a bunch of boxes from A to B, When I joined 10 years ago, and even still today, you would sometimes have to send a fax, right? You would make a phone call, you would send emails, right? So, totally offline, no transparency, lots of middlemen and middle kind of in that whole process. And so, you know, the concept of the company was let's just make it easy. Let's say all those who provide the pieces to make goods move from one side to the other and all those who need goods should be able to interact on a platform. Those who are moving goods should put their prices there. Those who need to move goods should choose the best way to move and boom, right? So a very, very, very simple concept. So when though we entered the fray, We very nicely went to the people who provide freight services and said, hey, give us your pricing, we'll put it on a platform and we'll let— we'll bring buyers. And they said, pricing? What does that look like? Right? So we don't have pricing. The way we get prices is actually been making a lot more phone calls and sending a lot of other emails. Right. And this is how we solved our chicken and egg problem. So everybody in a marketplace knows about the chicken and egg problem. Buyers, sellers. How do you bring? Who do you bring first? Right? You need to bring one and have them sitting there. And so, as soon as we understood that the freight providers didn't have pricing, we said, "Okay, here's our chicken or egg—one of them. Here's our tool." And the first thing we did—I mean, this actually happened for two years before I joined the company—was build a SaaS. Product to allow the, what are gonna be the sellers, to manage their pricing with their own customers, nothing to do with our marketplace, okay? And we spent 2 full years doing that. We built that and got all of the top freight logistics, kind of logistics providers, in this case, freight forwarders, using that tool, right? So, we had 200 very large companies using that tool. And then we said, okay, now it's easy. We have the pricing on this SaaS tool that we're almost actually, you know, we're making a lot of money on just that SaaS tool. Now we're going to tell them, hey guys, we're going to open that up on a public website and we're going to bring you buyers, right? And that's about the point when I joined the company. And when we said that to them, they said, what? No way. Are you crazy? There's absolutely no way we're letting you show any of our pricing to anybody. Okay. So we said, oops. Okay. So we kept on building that SaaS product, but then we created, basically we went to other providers. Now that we had the technology, we said to other providers, hey, do you want business? They said, yes, we want business. So we used our technology, we let them put their pricing on, and we started bringing buyers. And thus we created pretty quickly over a few years, About a $40 billion— sorry, $40 million marketplace. Okay. Now, at the same time, we acquired another few companies that were doing similar SaaS products. Okay. So we would have more of that supply. But what we discovered is actually what that supply— right, they were our supply. They were actually looking to buy something from someone else, and we could use our SaaS to create another marketplace, which we did between these freight logistics providers and the actual airlines. Okay, and this right now is a $1.5 billion marketplace, right? And now we're actually bringing it all together to hopefully create an even bigger one. So that at a high level basically was. Coming into the industry, finding that place to start, Stronghold with our SaaS product, thinking we were going this way, discovering we were actually going that way, and now trying to bring it all together.
