Tech / Freightos without Zvi: discipline, divergence and the cost of growing up 

Founder departures are rarely about one bad quarter. 

When serial entrepreneur and founder Zvi Schreiber (pictured) announced yesterday he was leaving the Freightos board, after 14 years building the company and barely weeks after relinquishing the CEO role, he chose his words carefully: “As our perspectives on the direction for the company have diverged, I prefer to step off the board at this time.” 

On the face of it, Freightos is not imploding: Q4 revenue was up 12% year on year; full-year revenue rose 24%; transactions hit a record 445,000, up 27%.

Gross booking value, a metric Freightos has traditionally valued highly, climbed 27% in Q4 and 44% for the year. The carrier network expanded to 77. and the company has logged 24 consecutive quarters of record transactions. 

But monetisation, and the time it takes to get there, is perhaps where Dr Schreiber and the board have parted company. 

Adjusted EBITDA for 2025 was still negative $11.2m. Cash at year-end stood at $27.9m. Guidance for 2026? Revenue growth of just 6%, to 12%, and EBITDA breakeven targeted for Q4. 

In other words: growth continues, but the board appears to have drawn a line in the sand. 

Zvi Schreiber’s LinkedIn profile shows a serial technologist’s arc: founder exits to IBM and GE, a web operating system before the cloud went mainstream, books on money and science. Freightos itself was built on the thesis that global freight, stuck in the 1990s, could be dragged into the digital marketplace age. 

What has changed appears to be the appetite for how fast, and how expensively, to pursue it. 

The board’s language in the latest results is revealing: “disciplined growth”; “sequencing our growth”; “solutions first”; “cost discipline”; looking for breakeven by the end of 2026. Is this the pivot from founder-led expansion to public-market maturity? 

Freightos has always sold a marketplace narrative: network effects, liquidity, carriers and forwarders meeting digitally at scale. Air bookings are in the low-to-mid teens of estimated market penetration, while ocean, structurally larger than air, remains a longer-term prize. 

The board, however, is now emphasising workflow embedding: procurement tools, tender management, rate management – SaaS first, transactions following organically. 

With $27m in cash and a guided year-end 2026 balance of around $20m, Freightos does not have unlimited options. The luxury of open-ended investment is likely gone. 

But Freightos’s operating metrics suggest engagement is rising, and carriers are integrating. 

Transactions and GBV are growing around 20%-plus. Revenue next year may grow in single digits, while solutions sales cycles have lengthened. 

The latest numbers underline the balancing act. Fourth-quarter revenue reached $7.4m, up 12% year on year, taking full-year revenue to $29.5m, a 24% increase. Platform revenue rose 18% for the year and solutions revenue 27%, although management acknowledged softer enterprise sales cycles in 2025. Adjusted EBITDA losses narrowed slightly, to $11.2m, for the year, and cash at year-end stood at $27.9m, which, said management, was enough to fund operations through to breakeven by Q4 26. 

Guidance for 2026 signals continued transaction and GBV growth in the high teens to low 20s, but revenue growth of just 6%-12%, reflecting that solutions softness and a deliberate focus on embedding workflows rather than chasing top-line acceleration. 

The board is now searching for a new CEO – the choice may be revealing. 

If the incoming chief is a cost-optimising operator, we will likely see tighter execution, slower but steadier growth, and a clearer move to breakeven. 

If the hire signals renewed commercial aggression, particularly around ocean integration and payments, then the board may be balancing discipline with some acceleration. 

Either way, the ever-courteous Dr Schreiber will be missed in the market. We look forward to finding out what his next big idea is – and hope it is in logistics.