SimpliRoute Plans Latin American Expansion Following $3M Series A

As more and more consumers purchase online, the demand for efficient ways to move goods from one place to another has logistics companies, such as SimpliRoute, in the right place at the right time.

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The Chile-based company recently secured a $3 million Series A round led by TheVentureCity.

Alvaro Echeverria started SimpliRoute after experimenting with response time intelligence applied to vehicles, he said via email.

“I was inspired by my master’s thesis at the University of Chile, where I developed a logistics model to reduce the response time for the fire department of Santiago, Chile,” Echeverria said. “That model reduced their response time by 40 percent, improving dramatically their efforts when saving people’s lives.”

In 2015, SimpliRoute was created as an urban logistics solution applied on delivery, retail, e-commerce or any other field in which vehicles need to go to places with some degree of routing planning.

TheVentureCity Founder and CEO Laura González-Estéfani said, via email, she was introduced to Echeverria by a friend and previous investor, and “loved the story behind how he and his team built the business.

“We thought that if these guys are able to build something that works well in logistics, in one of the most complex regions in the world for these matters, they would continue to build incredible things in the future,” González-Estéfani said.

‘Efficient urban delivery’

In addition to the recent funding infusion, the company has raised $1.5 million over the past five years, most recently in September 2018, from different U.S. and Chilean investors, including 500 Startups’s Batch 15 event and Wayra Chile.

However, because SimpliRoute turned profitable in August 2019, Echeverria said, company focus has turned to building and less about raising. It currently works with large companies such as Walmart and Unilever, as well as third-party logistics companies, he said.

“We make efficient urban delivery a reality by using advanced machine learning, route optimization and AI models to reduce our customer’s logistics costs, by up to 30 percent, and improve their real-time tracking, across their last-mile chain,” he added.

The company plans to use the new funding to grow its logistics intelligence platform that uses artificial intelligence to reduce logistics costs for global brands and companies.
SimpliRoute touts itself as one of the biggest logistics intelligence platforms in Latin America, with a presence in Mexico, Chile, Perú and Uruguay. The new funding will also help it expand to other countries.

“We have experienced high demand in the last year, and that’s why we are prioritizing growing our engineering teams and local presence in Colombia, Brazil and Argentina,” Echeverria said. “We already have customers in the U.S. and Europe, and we are going to invest in our product so that we can accelerate growth in those markets.”

Future growth

Recently, other logistic startups have had success in raising venture funds, such as India-based FarEye, which secured a $25 million Series D round in April. Swedish tech company Instabox also closed a €36 million (about $39 million) financing round in April. Meanwhile, Golden, Colorado-based Outrider, brought in $53 million in funding in February.

Since its inception, SimpliRoute has grown to 47 employees in four countries with plans to grow to about 65 people with the expansion into new countries, Echeverria said. The company is also experiencing two-and-a-half times the growth in year-over-year revenue.

“We are looking for talent to join our engineering, data science and machine-learning teams,” he said. “As we will also open Colombia, Argentina and Brazil, we will also need sales teams on the ground in those areas, so we will be also looking for sales and customer success teams in those countries.”

Photo caption: SimpliRoute’s urban logistics solution guides vehicles that need to go to places with some degree of routing planning.
Photo courtesy of SimpliRoute
Blogroll illustration: Li-Anne Dias