Hamburg-based startup Flowfox, which offers a platform for automating container imports, has just announced the closing of a pre-series-A funding round. An undisclosed seven-figure sum comes from Signal Ventures, the venture arm of Signal, a maritime technology company, MobilityFund, TecPier and theDOCK, as well as experienced business angels.
Flowfox operates in a global market with great potential
Flowfox emerged from Conlog, a startup founded in Berlin in 2018 by Moritz Dassing and Martin Orthen. In 2019, serial founder Patrick Pehmöller joined the company, which was renamed Flowfox and established its headquarters in Hamburg. The startup's offering consists of a global import automation platform that gives ocean carriers a tool to turn their import departments into profit centres while simplifying processes for their customers. Through automation, the platform reduces labour, errors and unnecessary costs, while providing real-time visibility and data generation, enabling more informed decision-making.
Flowfox has already announced a series of investments. The first pree-seed financing in November 2019 was in the six-digit range, the seed financing in December 2020 was already in the seven-digit range, as was a further round in December 2021. The current investors expect high growth potential in a market that has so far been little digitised, 85 percent of which is covered by only ten shipping companies worldwide. The Hamburg-based investor MobilityFund is counting on a kind of positive domino effect; once the first shipping companies have recognised the advantages, the pressure on competitors to also use Flowfox will increase.
