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I love it when a founder knows a niche and how to serve it. Today’s startup certainly appears to fit the bill.

Read on to discover how Shipio wants to help specialist logistics companies with the headache that is pricing up a job that involves multiple steps and multiple partner companies.

The startup is an evolution of a startup in that very space, so they know what they’re talking about.

– Martin

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Shipio is simplifying a complex problem in the specialist logistics market

Logistics isn’t a simple, one-size-fits-all market.

Once you look beyond ecommerce or neat pallets of items, there’s a whole world of specialist companies that deal with moving high-value, delicate, or bulky items, or those that have regulations around their movement.

This could be anything from an expensive painting to aircraft parts. Heavy industry, agriculture, defence, fine art, wine, and aerospace are all areas that can require specialist logistics providers. These companies serve specific markets, having invested in the right equipment, storage spaces, security, and training to provide the service their customers need.

It’s in this market where Shipio has spotted an opportunity.

“A lot of these specialist logistics suppliers are small, with 20 to 200 people. They work on one or two sites, and they'll have a local customer base but it's very international. So if they are London-based specialists in a particular vertical, they'll be asked by their customer to move something to Hong Kong, and so they'll need to reach out to other specialist partners around the world to put together that service,” explains Hugo Cooke, Shipio’s founder.

Cooke says that this can often end up with multiple specialists and freight intermediaries working on a single job, organising a single price for the customer to cover them all.

Where Shipio wants to step in is to solve a familiar problem in complex projects: inefficiency. Logistics pricing tools are typically built for more standard shipments so there are a lot of emails and Excel spreadsheets in the specialist logistics world.

“They work in events, and they're loading into a stage at a particular venue and they know it needs to be out of hours work or an extra three hours for site access. Or maybe they’re transporting a particular drug from a particular lab and they need a few hours for extra compliance, or it's got to be cold chain for that particular drug,” Cooke says.

“There are examples in every single one of these specialist verticals and because you can't encode those rules, everything breaks off into Excel models. The whole process takes hours of work just to generate a price. It can take up to five or six days with the communication between partners, and there can be errors.”

Shipio wants to lighten the load by making the arrangement of these complex jobs far simpler.

“It has a seamless work load through from pricing inputs to quote generation, multi-party co-pricing, through to booking, invoicing, and settlement,” Cooke says.

“It’s powered by what we call a ‘hybrid agentic deterministic pricing engine’, which can handle these very complex rule sets and multi-party co-pricing, all in an instantaneous workflow. What that means is everybody can now work together in an automated way.”

Cooke explains that Shipio can process emails from customers requesting quotes, automatically requesting more information from customers where required. It can then build a full plan for getting the load to its destination, incorporating partner logistic companies where necessary, and generate a quote for the full job.

“The end customer receives their quotes in seconds and everybody's saving time. Also the partners who work together currently, can still work together, but now it's fully digitised. They can increase volume for each other by increasing win rates and passing work to each other as well.”

The story so far

Cooke began his career in the oil and gas sector as an engineer and in M&A. He says what he learned there stood him in good stead for what he does now.

“The crossover is very complex physical systems, quite a lot of uncertainty. There’s quite a lot of risk, in terms of it being high-cost logistics, and if you get the pricing wrong, the margins can disappear very quickly. Managing that risk, and taking these complex models to generate revenue, is the important thing,” he says.

He then shifted into the specialist logistics market, founding Tokoney, a tech-enabled business focused on the transportation of fine art. The startup raised investment from SFC Capital and others, but the problems they encountered led them towards creating Shipio.

“We were working for the end customer, like galleries, and we were putting together multiple suppliers in the background in order to serve the end customer through our platform. It taught us a lot about that industry, with hundreds of high-value shipments, and we grew it to a £1 million annual run rate,” Cooke says.

“But ultimately, we weren't solving the real problem. In that model, we were still relying on non-digitised suppliers in the background and the scalability for us was limited.”

And so Shipio has launched to better solve the inefficiencies in the market. Cooke is the sole founder but is accompanied by a team experienced in marketplaces and logistics.

Shipio plans to charge a percentage fee on successful transactions over the platform, rather than lock customers in a recurring subscription. Having now completed a beta test, the startup plans to generate its first revenue next month as it begins a pilot programme with initial customers in the fine arts space.

Cooke says the technology that underpins the startup is easily adaptable to new markets. Event logistics, jewellery, medical equipment, and aerospace are other markets on the startup’s roadmap.

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