SimpliRoute, the first Smart Logistics solution in Latin America, closes a $3 million Series A round led by TheVentureCity, the new investment and acceleration model that helps diverse entrepreneurs achieve global impact. Despite the global crisis caused by the Covid-19, the Chilean startup has managed to capture the attention of investors, with CLIN and Corfo de Chile also participating.
With this new investment, the team led by Álvaro Echevarría and Eyal Shats, wants to “stimulate growth in the European and American markets, improve its logistics platform driven by artificial intelligence, and strengthen the engineering, IT, machine learning and sales teams in several countries in the region such as Brazil, Argentina and Colombia”.
Democratizes logistics intelligence
The Chilean startup lands in the logistics industry in 2015 with a clear objective – to develop an urban logistics solution to optimize the delivery routes and management of goods through artificial intelligence.
“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 de Chile, says Álvaro Echevarría, CEO and Cofounder of SimpliRoute. He also added “thanks to it, we managed to reduce the response time by 40%, which drastically improved their ability to save lives”.
SimpliRoute is positioned as one of the leading logistics intelligence platforms in Latin America, with a presence in Mexico, Chile, Peru and Uruguay. Over the past five years, the logistics company has raised $1.5 million. The last capital injection was in September 2018, where different investors from the USA and Chile participated. Currently, they work with large companies such as Walmart and Unilever, as well as with third-party logistics companies. The SimpliRoute team already has 47 people operating in Mexico, Chile, Peru and Uruguay and, thanks to this investment, they hope to become a team of 65 people.
According to Laura Gonzalez-Estéfani, CEO and founder of TheVentureCity, “When we analyzed SimpliRoute, we realized its great business and investment potential of the logistics sector and found it very interesting to have the opportunity to step into it.” She also adds, “If this team has been able to build something that works well in the logistics field, in one of the most complex regions for this purpose, they will continue to build incredible things in the future.”
SimpliRoute makes urban delivery a reality using advanced machine learning, route optimization and artificial intelligence models. In doing so, it has managed to reduce its customers’ logistics costs by up to 30 percent and improve its real-time tracking, through the “last mile” chain, and the final process of delivering an online store order to its buyer.