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It’s a story as old as SaaS: tech startup finds a valuable niche that hasn’t modernised its processes, and builds a service to fit that market.

And today we find out how FRAI Global wants to tackle the huge freight forwarding market. Read on!

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Stop SaaD in its tracks

FRAI Global wants to make life simple for the huge freight forwarding sector

It’s a common problem for tech startups to address: the businesses that still work on spreadsheets and email. But somehow, 14 years after Marc Andreessen declared that software was “eating the world”, the SaaS platform revolution still hasn’t taken full effect everywhere.

Observing this ‘spreadsheets and email’ problem in the freight forwarding sector, FRAI Global spotted an opportunity for AI in this market that is globally worth $216.47 billion and growing.

For a sector that thrives on optimising costs, relying on spreadsheets is certainly not optimal, says FRAI Global CEO and co-founder Elliot Morris:

“Rate comparisons usually take hours, and they're not really picking the best rates as well. A lot of the time they're taking a snapshot, they don't have a real-time feed for the rates, and it's very disconnected and there is lots of opportunity for manual errors.”

And so FRAI Global is building what Morris calls a “central operating system to help move freight forward.

“We are building an end-to-end system that allows you to build in different types of workflows and automations for processes that typically were very manual and disconnected, and would have you going across different spreadsheets, different supplier portals, and potentially old legacy TMS [transport management system] systems.”

Once fully built, the web portal will allow freight forwarders to connect up their current systems in one place, simplifying workflows that previously involved working with data across multiple locations.

“It's almost like a layer on top. The idea is, as customers work with us over time, we will have more and more modules and workflows completed, so they'll be at a point where they can use this as their only core system and not really have to come out of it to do any of their tasks,” Morris adds.

He explains that AI agents have been set up to conduct workflow-based tasks, such as generating a quote by pulling together information from multiple sources.

This isn’t as simple as it might seem, Morris says, giving an example of the complexities they face:

“For document parsing, we've got a multi-modal RAG system that will read any type of spreadsheet or CSV. It's been prompted to look for anything that looks like a rate. It then parses that into a collection of rates to be used in the future.

“These spreadsheets are not typical CSV files. They’ve got loads of random writing all over them, so we have to build something a bit clever to actually understand what is a rate and what is just text.”

The story so far

FRAI Global has emerged from Mozstro, the consultancy Morris has run for the past four years, drawing on his experience as a software engineer. As AI came to prominence three years ago, he began building tools for clients with the new tech.

Working alongside Matthew Place and Lewis Leach, he began to offer AI strategy and discovery sessions with businesses in regulated markets. Thanks to a cold call Place made that got him directly through to a CEO, they discovered the challenges faced by freight forwarding companies and spotted an opportunity to go beyond consultancy and build a marketable product.

With new regulations imposing newly digitised processes on the market (see the EU’s ICS2 and eFTI), it felt like the timing was right.

The team has already built some of the modules that will make up the full software suite. Morris says the quoting module already integrates with two tier-one shipping companies.

FRAI Global is currently part of the Turing Innovation Catalyst Engine Room AI accelerator in Manchester.

“Next year we’re planning a light SaaS version of the product, where we can cut bits of modules out and sell them to freight forwarding companies. We've managed to sell that twice within the past couple of weeks, and we're building up a really steady pipeline of other companies looking to adopt the minimised quoting module now as well,” Morris says.

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