• Oman-based VC Phaze Ventures has participated in the $8.4 million Series A round of US-based shipping supply chain software platform Voyager Portal. The investor list includes ScOp Venture Capital and Flexport. 
• Founded in 2018 by Matthew Costello and Bret Smart, Voyager Portal is a SaaS platform helping companies reduce risk, cost, and complexity across their marine supply chain.
• The SaaS startup will channel its newly acquired funds to expedite its product roadmap, supporting an international client base whilst expanding engineering, development, marketing, and sales teams internationally.

Press release:

The US-based marine supply chain software platform Voyager Portal has successfully raised $8.4 million in a Series A investment led by Phaze Ventures with the participation of strategic investors including ScOp Venture Capital and global supply chain player and investor Flexport. 

Founded in 2018, Voyager Portal is a SaaS platform helping companies reduce risk, cost, and complexity across their marine supply chain. The company is Headquartered in Houston, Texas, and was founded by industry experts Matthew Costello and Bret Smart who were frustrated by the vast inefficiencies and lack of data-driven decision-making in their industry.

A global investor focus in the T&L sector has been highly recorded in our Q3 2021 EVM Transport & Logistics Venture Investment Report. Across Emerging Venture Markets, a 44 per cent growth in the number of transactions this year by Q3 2021 accounted for more than 660 per cent of capital deployed in the sector across MENA, Turkey, and Pakistan. This comes amidst a global trend of integrated Tech, software solutions, and supply chain optimization across T&L sectors and geographies. Turkey and Pakistan raised the lion’s share of funding for T&L startups in EVMs, where Turkey-based Getir raised more than $1 billion this year and Pakistan-based Airlift Technologies raised an unprecedented $85 million Series B round by 2021. 

The new funding comes on the back of unprecedented growth since the company raised $1.5 million in seed money in a round co-lead by Phaze Ventures and ATX Ventures in 2019. Since then, revenue has increased 13x from Q3 2020 to Q3 2021 and was up 40 per cent from Q2 2021.  “Voyager Portal was created to significantly reduce cost, risk, and complexity when transporting bulk materials around the world,” said Matthew Costello, CEO, and co-founder of Voyager. “The last two years have demonstrated just how critical shipping bulk commodities is to global markets – freight rates have increased and port congestion is at an all-time high – accelerating the demand for Voyager’s solution.”

Voyager’s low-code architecture, which allows customers to quickly and easily configure the platform to match their business processes, is a unique differentiator in a market dominated by rigid legacy systems. The platform was also built from the ground up to be a multi-party system, allowing companies to seamlessly collaborate in real-time over a single shipment. Working in a unified system allows for all parties to manage, track and analyze the lifecycle of a shipment with greater context and insight. "Marine shipping is a complex process,” said Kevin O’Connor, managing partner, ScOp Venture Capital. “It involves coordination between many parties. Voyager allows you to customise workflows, consolidate critical information and track your shipments throughout the world. Voyager dramatically increases productivity while reducing risk."

Voyager surpassed the $1 billion mark for freight managed on the platform with customers including manufacturers, traders, and shippers in the renewable energy, commodity trading, mining, and petrochemicals industries. The SaaS startup will channel its newly acquired funds to expedite its product roadmap, supporting an international client base whilst expanding engineering, development, marketing, and sales teams internationally. With high hopes for the startup and software platform  Abdullah Al-Shaksy, co-founder and CEO, Phaze Ventures concluded “Voyager is changing the way companies are thinking of their global shipping operations. Global supply chains are becoming increasingly complex and strained, and there is an incredible treasure trove of data that organizations are underutilising in their decision-making process. We believe what Voyager has created for their customers across the globe will revolutionize this space forever.”