UAE group Fero secures $1.1m in funding
DUBAI, November 3, 2021
Fero, a cloud-based UAE company, has announced the successful closure of the fundraising of $1.1 million from a boutique institutional investor and various prominent angel investors.
Fero is an RPA (robotic process automation) and ERP (enterprise resource planning) products firm which has created Transport Interactive Assistant (TiA), the world’s first intelligent virtual assistant for supply chain, provides an ecosystem of Transport ERPs and TiA, said a statement from the company
The TiA listens, understands, talks, and messages over various messaging platforms, just like Alexa built for logistics enterprises.
With its new infusion of capital, Fero looks to add tech engineers to its team to continue growing its product capabilities in addition to boosting its presence in Europe and further work on additional integrations with Freight ERPs, it added.
“The raise is a great validation of the current success and future potential of Fero products and the team,” remarked Carolin-Carmen Neubauer, the Co-Founder and COO of Fero.
A part of the Microsoft Growth X programme and its novel B2B innovation, Fero is already being adopted and in use by marquee clients such as DSV, Gulftainer and Emirates Logistics with customers in GCC, India and the UK, helping operations employees to automate everyday tasks such booking loads, collecting shipment documents and checking on the status of drivers and be left with only having to manage exceptions.
"Imagine the scale of orders and new customers you can suddenly handle with a skeleton of a team with zero errors!” stated Neubauer, adding “the Fero customer acquisition growth figures of above 20% month-on-month speak for themselves.”
The Fero's ecosystem includes SaaS for First, Last and Mid-Mile Transport Management, Delivery Management and the unique SaaS product of a “Plug-and-Play Uberisation" for Road-Freight, called FAST (Freight Aggregation Software for Trucking), all of them come with TiA as well as TiA works on with any other Freight ERP in the market.
She pointed out that by applying TiA to the existing Freight ERPs, Fero has helped clients from several key sectors including distribution, retail and logistics, automate over 2,000,000 interactions – including emails and calls, related to 100,000 automated truck trips end to end from rate exploration until invoicing, thus netting these clients a combined savings of an estimated $18 million.
“Visibility and communication between internal and external parties are critical albeit very difficult as shippers, transporters and freight forwarders use various transport management and delivery management systems," observed Neubauer.
"Everyone is tired of new apps so we rely on existing communication tools such as WhatsApp, plus we know that in a fragmented market such as the road freight market where e.g. the top six carriers hold less than 5% market share of a 105 billion euro ($121.68 billion) market, there will never be unity in the systems in use,” she stated.
The power of the Fero software is the improved optimisation through enhancement of asset allocation with the help of applying machine learning based on a complex set of variables such as driver constraints, vehicle constraints, route constraints, all combined with customer behaviour when allocating and receiving the shipment, she added.
Fero’s Series A is targeted for starting to raise in Q4 2021/Q1 2022.-TradeArabia News Service
