Morocco’s Freterium raises $4M to expand its freight trucking software across MENA
Freterium, a Morocco-based startup that digitalizes freight trucking through its software, has raised a $4 million seed round to expand across the country and the Middle East and North African region.
The funding round was led by San Francisco-based investor, Partech with participation from CDG Invest, Y Combinator, Flexport, Swiss Founders Fund, Outlierz Ventures, and a few angel investors from the U.S., Europe, Asia, and Africa.
The Y Combinator-backed, Freterium was launched in 2020 by Mehdi Cherif Alami and Omar El Kouhene with the sole aim of solving critical backend challenges of the freight industry.
“We’re building a logistics operating system to allow the shippers, our customers to manage all of their domestic shipments on a single interface. So we connect organizations, people, and technologies across the entire logistics value chain,” said CEO Mehdi Cherif Alami.
“And our main product is transport management software for shippers enables multi-enterprise collaboration. But also, very importantly, it’s platform-agnostic. So we are neutral software that plays nice with everyone. So we’re the Switzerland of logistics, in that sense.”
Alami and Kouhene are leveraging their past consulting and logistics experience in Africa and the Middle East with McKinsey, PwC, OCP Group, and Strateg& (formerly Booz & Company). According to Alami, the company’s Transport Management Software helps freight businesses handle shipments from ports to factories, then items from factories to warehouses, B2B clients, and finally end customers.
Freterium software assists in executing and monitoring shipments by sharing shipment information with parties engaged in the transaction. After the shipment is delivered, merchants may monitor bills from delivery companies, examine performance and service quality, and gain insight into inefficiencies inside their company.
Freterium onboarded more than 20 enterprise customers in its first full year of operation, expanding 35 percent month over month, according to Alami. In addition, more than 3,000 people use the company’s software.
While incumbents have high implementation costs and lengthy installation times that can last months, customers can install the Freterium platform in under a week with no upfront expenditures. Enterprise clients pay once the system is up and running, “as little as a few hundred dollars to a few thousand dollars a month,” Alami said.
“We have been looking closely at the freight trucking market in Africa and the Middle East for the past five years, a market worth $250 billion. Unfortunately, 85% of the volume is carried through established legacy partnerships between shippers and carriers and still run with manual, inefficient tools,” Partech general partner Cyril Collon said about the investment.
“Freterium has built a holistic approach to solving the key challenges of the industry, and we are excited to support them in their mission to empower manufacturers, retailers, and logistics teams across Africa.”
Alami said the funds would be invested in the company’s R&D, hire more talent to double the current size of its team within the next 12 months, market its software, and expand across Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE.