Startup and Technology News
French startup SpaceFill has raised a $27 million funding round (€25 million) led by NGP Capital with Maersk Growth and existing investors Eurazeo and La Famiglia also participating. The company is building a warehousing cloud across several European countries that offers both flexibility and transparency.
SpaceFill doesn’t work with e-commerce companies trying to store goods before shipping them to customers. Instead, the company focuses exclusively on the B2B side of the industry, which is arguably the larger side of the industry. You could compare SpaceFill to Flexe and Stord — but SpaceFill focuses on Europe.
The company has built a network of 1,500 warehouses that are all connected to the same software orchestrating layer. This software layer acts as a sort of control tower for your inventory and logistics strategy.
Those warehouses are third-party logistics providers that have chosen to allocate part of their warehousing space to SpaceFill customers. They can still accept their own customers, but they can more easily fill up the rest of their warehouses thanks to SpaceFill.
On the other side, SpaceFill acts as a long-term logistics partner. Instead of working with a traditional logistics outsourcing company, SpaceFill becomes your logistics partner.
Customers can leverage SpaceFill’s network for cross-docking operations, which means that a truck can drop several goods in a warehouse so that multiple trucks can pick up a smaller quantity of those goods and move them to another location.
SpaceFill also handles variations in capacity needs, which can be particularly useful for your seasonality strategy. Just like cloud storage, you can easily store more goods (and pay more), or reduce your storage capacity when you need less warehousing space.
“In the logistics industry, the tech stack is super old and super hard to interconnect,” co-founder and CEO Maxime Huzar told me. “We have built a sort of power adapter that connects with the entire network.”
SpaceFill currently serves 500 customers, such as Ikea, Angell Bike and Leroy Merlin. It has 60 employees and generates more than €10 million in revenue. The company plans to hire another 80 employees to improve its platform and expand its network.
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