News / Kontainers' Graham Parker returns – with another big idea

Graham Parker, co-founder of digital start-up ocean freight management platform Kontainers, which was acquired by Descartes for $12m in 2020, has returned to the logistics industry with a new venture.

Speaking exclusively to The Loadstar on the sidelines of last week’s S&P TPM conference in Long Beach, Mr Parker said his new firm, Ship Angel, had developed a freight rate management platform aimed at shippers, whereas “other rate managment platforms such as CargoSphere, Catapult and Portrix were all aimed at freight forwarders”.

He added: “No one has developed the same for shippers, 90% of which are still using Excel.

“Shippers haven’t had this before and it needs to be supplied by a SaaS provider rather than carrier or forwarder, because they can then trust that it’s neutral.”

The company did a soft launch last year and has hit a $100,000 annual recurring revenue run rate since.

“The goal is to get to $1m by the end of this year. We’ve got about 20 customers so far – five of which are Fortune Top 500 companies – and the goal is to reach 100 customers.

“Shouldn’t be too hard – there are a million of them in the US alone,” he added.

Mr Parker, an Irish national, moved to New York and purchased distressed start-up WaySync, “because it had some rock star developers”.

Ship Angel has largely been self-financed so far, and Mr Parker revealed he had rejected a number of venture capital advances and was not seeking to raise outside funds, as the investment profile of the software industry had rapidly changed.

“It is four times cheaper to build tech than it was a decade ago, because of AI. One in every four lines of our code is now written by AI, and this is changing the investment dynamics of the industry,” he explained.

“There are a lot of companies which raised a lot of money a few years ago that are going to find it very difficult to maintain valuations, because so much of that cash went into hiring developers, and AI is changing that need,” he added.

Mr Parker described Kontainers – the sale of which had a suddenness that took observers by surprise – as having a reached a “crossroads; we either hired more staff, which would have involved raising funds, to try and go for growth, or we got a sale under our belt.

“I wanted to experience the exit process – we had three offers and went with Descartes because they were really nice people, and that counted.

“Kontainers was a hugely profound experience – the buzz of taking an idea, building it up and then adding value to customers is really addictive. And now I want to build something far bigger,” he said.