Marina Hadjipateras-backed venture capital firm TMV is among the latest group of investors to back a Singapore-headquartered maritime procurement start-up.
ShipsKart has just raised $2.7m in Series A funding to help finance an expansion of its global footprint to other countries.
The round was led by TMV and Hermes Offshore, with strategic investments from the likes of Motion Ventures, Tradeworks.vc and Eternia Investments.
“We are pleased to lead this round of financing and partner with the ShipsKart team in order to continue supporting their mission to revolutionise purchasing, efficiency and transparency for the maritime space,” said Hadjipateras.
ShipsKart said it plans to use the funding to open physical fulfilment warehousing centres located near ports for greater efficiencies.
“Doing so will help to improve cost-effectiveness and delivery services to meet the schedule of ships as they port,” it said in a statement.
The company was founded by master mariner captain Dhruv Sawhney, along with co-founders Sunny Bagla and Vivek Sahi.
“In almost every industry today, eCommerce platforms are the norm yet maritime procurement still lags behind,” said Sawhney.
“Typically, procurement processes are unstructured and coordinated manually by managing individual vendors via emails and phone calls to source quotes, conduct know your client checks, manage deliveries and after-sales queries.
“With ShipsKart, purchase officers will have a single marketplace to manage the entire end-to-end process saving significant time, while gaining data-driven insights on historical price information and identifying opportunities to improve efficiencies by mapping purchasing patterns and trends,” he added.
To date, the company said it has “processed more than 2,000 successful orders across the world, delivering savings of up to 20% on the price of the products and overall delivery costs”.
ShipsKart said it has expanded into 17 new markets in the past year, bringing its presence to more than 40 around the world. It has more than 500 partners and claims to be on track to increase its sales by 100% in 2022.
It also claims to have been the first in the industry to launch a mobile app for maritime procurement and expects that in a few years, it will become commonplace for orders would be created, approved and delivered, through its app.
“An online marketplace like ShipsKart is well overdue in maritime,” said Shaun Hon, general partner of Motion Ventures, the Singapore-based investment vehicle of European venture builder Rainmaking.
“The founding team … are deeply in tune with the most pressing needs of procurement teams and created the step change needed to galvanise the industry into a more resilient future.
“Technology and digitisation are the big answer to the strained supply chain and ShipsKart’s innovative solution to the challenges we’re seeing are a major first step for helping the maritime industry across the board.”
