AI visibility boost

Portcast has announced the completion of its US$3.2m Pre-Series A financing led by Newtown Partners (via the Imperial Venture Fund) with participation from Innoport, the venture capital unit of the Schulte Group, TMV Ventures and Wavemaker Partners. The financing comes as ports and the wider supply chain are seeing significant delays and congestion.

“We believe that companies with predictive visibility on cargo movements have a significantly higher preparedness to downstream planning and customer service, and we have seen the impact with reductions in overall port fees by 20% and manual work by 80% for our customers,” said Nidhi Gupta, CEO and co-founder of Portcast.

Real-time visibility

Portcast enables freight forwarders and manufacturers across the world to achieve real-time visibility, reduce operational costs and improve customer experience by accurately predicting the estimated time of arrivals of more than 90% of ships globally and forecasting demand for over 30,000 (air) routes daily through an intuitive SaaS platform and APIs.

The cloud-based technology can also map out the cascading effects of disruptions, such as Typhoon In-fa, allowing forwarders and shippers to respond and react more effectively in such scenarios.

The now raised capital will go towards international expansion, doubling the team size as well as product enhancement, moving from predictive AI to prescriptive AI and launching new product features such as order-level visibility and scenario planning.