News / The 2025 roadmap for Freightos: ocean APIs, AI, growth and dynamic pricing

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Ocean online bookings are the next frontier for Freightos, a step it hopes to take in 2025. 

Noting that “most of the big lines” have committed to at least providing APIs, Freightos founder and CEO Zvi Schreiber said the signs were there that ocean freight is nearly ready. 

“The ocean industry is also adopting digital solutions at last. So we hope to see good growth on ocean e-bookings.  

“A couple of the lines have already provided APIs, and the others have committed to next year. It’s not because of us – it’s the customers demanding it,” said Dr Schreiber.

“The big BCOs, the big NVOCCs, want to connect digitally. So, I think 2025 will be the year that ocean will be at the same point we were at in 2020 in air.” 

There is some way to go, however, he added. 

“Ocean is a significant part of our business, but most of it is semi-digital. You’re booking on a website, but the rate’s still coming out of an Excel sheet. It’s not a fully digital booking. So we do quite a lot of ocean, but fully digital ocean bookings are still a rarity at this point.  

“But we’re seeing good momentum, that the ocean liners and the industry are demanding and that transformation will happen in ocean as well, so we’re excited about that.” 

Most ocean lines don’t have APIs for real-time rate bookings, and there is no confirmation of the specific ship booked, but the Excel rates are valid, and the booking is instant. But Dr Schreiber wants to do more. 

“We’d like not just to see a rate, but also a specific voyage, and then get instant confirmation that your container’s on the voyage. In air, we do that many thousands of times a day. In ocean, very few carriers support that, but I’m quite optimistic it will be coming soon.” 

Despite passenger e-ticketing and online booking being around for 25 years, air cargo “wasn’t quick either”, said Dr Schreiber. 

“In ocean, I think it’s partly because ocean is slower. If you’re going to wait 30 days for your container and then you wait one day for a quote, it’s annoying, but it’s not that annoying. But in air, you’re paying top dollar because it’s urgent, so waiting a day for an air quote is just unacceptable.” 

And there’s the issue of legacy systems in ocean, which air has now largely resolved. 

“The ocean liners grew a lot through acquisition, and so sometimes they have multiple IT systems, so it’s hard for them to provide a single booking API because in different regions they made different acquisitions. There’s a lot of legacy there, but I hope a year from now we’ll have forgotten about that and all the ocean liners will be digitally connected.” 

Freightos’s other expectation for 2025 is increased use of AI. 

“I know AI is a big buzzword, but it’s also real. It’s a very powerful technology, and we’re putting a lot of emphasis on using it both internally and within our products,” explained Dr Schreiber. “The key thing is to pair AI with data. 

“So we have a vast amount of data on bookings, especially in air, but also in ocean. So we know what the rates are, we know what the booking windows are, what the weight breaks are, and so we’ve got all the status. So you can combine it with AI to notice patterns, to predict trends. So that combination of AI with a very comprehensive data set is powerful. 

“It’s actionable insight. So, if a freight forwarder is using us for their quoting, then maybe we can help them to identify that a particular customer is quoting less, and maybe at risk of churning. Or, if we think their rates are too high and they’re losing business, or their rates are too low and they’re leaving money on the table.

“So it’s actionable insight for the freight forwarders, for the shippers, for the airlines, so that they can set their prices more effectively, so that they can be aware of customers that are at risk.” 

Much of that will be built into the Freightos SaaS products, as part of the “constant improvement”.  

“But there are certain cases, for example dynamic pricing, which tends to be a separate product.” 

Dynamic rates – along with interline bookings – are also on the Freightos roadmap for 2025. 

“We’ve got most of the airlines connected to us in real time, but the majority of them are not using dynamic pricing, we actually see that the rate is the same for days on end. So there’s still a human putting that rate in a spreadsheet once a week, or once every two weeks. There’s an opportunity for the airline industry to be much more dynamic and efficient, and to improve revenues through how it sets its prices.” 

It remains a surprise that Freightos, with its weighty market presence, is still not profitable – a fact which must be of concern to its smaller, less-developed competitors. But Dr Schrieber said Freightos preferred to invest. 

“We have a very healthy gross profit, but we’re choosing to invest a lot in research and development  Last quarter, we had $6.2m in revenue and a gross profit of over $4m. We’re making money, but then we’re reinvesting it.

“It was never our goal to become profitable immediately. Our goal was to grow and build technology. What we need to do now to get to profitability is just more scale, so we need two more years of growth. We project that within two years, by the fourth quarter of 2026, we’ll be at the scale where we’ll have a net profit as well – in the order of $40m a year in revenue.” 

For now, the message continues to be one of growth. For airlines already onboard, this means adding new regions, more complex verticals, interlining and dynamic pricing. There are still some airlines to bring into the fold, mostly in Asia. And of course, ocean (ground bookings and data are largely provided by partner companies). And there are payment options too, which so far are mostly used by SME forwarders. 

“It’s not yet at scale, but we’ve done enough payments now, with a few airlines and a few dozen forwarders for maybe hundreds and hundreds of orders. It’s enough to show that it works well and that there’s a better way to do payments. We’re not trying to compete with [IATA’s] CASS, which works well but is old-fashioned. It’s about providing an alternative.” 

Dr Scheiber said he didn’t expect any M&A announcements next year, following the Shipsta deal a few months ago. It’s likely that among the first news out of the company next year will be on its new CFO, the search “under way and going well”. 

“It’s got to be somebody who understands the business, who can understand the numbers, and use that to help us plan our growth.” Of which, it appears, there will be a lot more.