Haulio Co-Founders CEO Alvin Ea (R) and CPO Sebastian Shen
Singapore-headquartered digital container haulage platform Haulio has secured US$7 million in a Series A funding round led by Temasek unit Heliconia Capital.
New investors that joined the round are Ondine Capital (China), Cornerstone Ventures (Taiwan), FuturePlay (South Korea), Newtown Partners via the Imperial Venture Fund (South Africa), and XA Network.
Existing investors, including B7 Capital, ComfortDelGro, iSeed SEA, Iterative (US), and PSA unboXed, have also participated.
The fresh funds will be used to strengthen Haulio’s haulage capabilities, service quality, and product engineering and development. The startup is also following its regional growth ambition throughout Southeast Asia.
As per a press statement, Haulio is actively hiring top talent in strategic business functions to support its growth plans in markets like Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Vietnam.
Also read: The first-mile container logistics is ripe for digital disruption. Here’s how Haulio is doing it
Founded in 2016 by CEO Alvin Ea and CPO Sebastian Shen, Haulio connects hauliers and shippers.
“Container shipping volumes are on the rapid rise, so there needs to be greater optimisation and streamlining of haulage trips, given the increasing shortage in equipment and drivers,” said Ea. “The complex and fragmented nature of our business continues to be a challenge, especially when container haulage has been a vertical that often gets left behind.”
Haulio boasts of having onboarded 90 per cent of Singapore’s hauliers and established presences in Indonesia and Thailand. In Thailand alone, it has aggregated more than 3,000 hauliers. For shippers, Haulio provides prime mover and trailer rental and leasing service and embedded financing.
In 2021, it partnered with fintech players such as Funding Societies and Aspire to offer faster pay-out and supply chain financing and with ComfortDelgro and Goldbell to offer leasing of prime mover trucks.
As of now, Haulio claims to have transacted more than two million containers, with over 50 per cent of the transactions completed in 2021 alone. The startup expects to triple its revenue by the end of 2022 as the global supply chain rebounds.
Haulio said it also helps reduce the carbon emissions from container trucking and unnecessary transportation of empty containers due to its effective job matching and resource pooling. So far, it claims to have optimised over 200,000 containers, saving over 3,000 metric tonnes of carbon emission.
Last year, Haulio raised an undisclosed amount in pre-Series A funding. In 2018, it netted US$741,710 in seed round.
According to a market study by Quince Market Insights, the global first- and last-mile delivery market reached US$ 493.2 million in 2021 and is expected to exhibit a CAGR of 13.8 per cent over the forecast period 2021 to 2030. Asia is set to grow as the top player in the global maritime trade arena, especially in the SEA region with trade volumes expected to increase by 130 per cent in 2023 to US$5,653 billion.
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Image Credit: Haulio
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