MANILA, PHILIPPINES — Expedock, a Filipino-founded startup providing AI-powered services to supply chain companies globally, is announcing that it has raised a total of $4 million in seed round following the recent $2.5M investment led by Neo’s CEO, Ali Partovi, who has previously backed Airbnb, Dropbox, Facebook, and Uber. Additional investors include executives at top global startups and tech companies such as eBay, Foodpanda, coins.ph, Salesforce, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram, among many.
To date, Expedock is moving thousands of freight containers internationally every week using their new-to-market technology and excellent service delivery that has unlocked up to 90% cost savings for global logistics companies including a.hartrodt, Rose Containerline, Premier Services Italia, Andalin, Fremura, CNT and MHM Global, among others and is rapidly onboarding 5x more clients month on month.
With the global supply chain market projected to reach $37.41 billion by 2027, one of the biggest headaches most industry players have is managing the series of stringent documentation processes required to move products internationally. The time consuming process eats up a significant amount of employee bandwidth that could have been allocated to revenue generating activities for companies at the same time making businesses vulnerable to incurring unwanted costs due to manual data errors.
These rampant pain points across the industry gave birth to the tech startup founded in 2019 by 23-year old CEO, King Alandy Dy, a Filipino immigrant from the family of shippers in the Philippines. King was fortunate to receive a scholarship to Stanford University where he met Rui Aguiar, CTO, an AI genius who worked at the exclusive Google AI lab. Together, both King and Rui have professional experience across tech giants like Facebook, Airbnb, Shopee, Stripe, and Intuit. Coming back home to Manila, King reconnected with a Filipino childhood friend and Expedock’s third Co-founder, Jeff Tan, COO who brings to the table his network and experience in managing the operations of the leading global forwarder in the Philippines.
According to the founders, their proprietary Artificial Intelligence (AI) called Expedock Nuance technology™, which is a smart machine that performs tasks by simulating human intelligence, removes the need for manual data entry and processing via workflow automation. Businesses involved in the supply chain industry share a common headache in which most of their staff spend too much time on manual data extraction, entry, and processing from physical documents. With the huge volume of data and documentations needed to move products from
Point A to B, manual data entry and extraction prove to be painful, expensive, and time consuming not to mention prone to error.
With Expedock’s AI, businesses are able to eliminate all data extraction and data entry work for airway bills, bills of ladings, invoices, which decreases turnaround time by up to 10x and improves data accuracy by 99.99% as the smart machine works with unlimited capacity 24/7 removing the human error aspect.
“We’ve seen firsthand how the errors in the first mile of shipping lead to costly corrections amounting up to $25,000. Freight forwarders have had to manually encode and process significant amounts of paperwork which with one mistake could cost a company thousands of dollars to correct. With Expedock, our technology comes in to convert any paper-based documents or scans into structured data for their freight systems. Our software provides the infrastructure for their data thereby eliminating unwanted costs due to manual errors”, says Alandy Dy.
To help deliver world-class service to international clients, Expedock has been recruiting and on the lookout for high-caliber talent to join its global team of experts in their respective fields. From its humble headcount of five staff in September 2020, the team has expanded exponentially to now 35 and counting from around the world working remotely.
