Booking platform CargoAi believes that the Covid-19 outbreak has accelerated the use of digital solutions in air cargo.
The Singapore-based company's chief executive, Matthieu Petot, told Air Cargo News that it has doubled the size of the team of the last six months in response to growing demand.
"Digitalisation was already a necessity for the air cargo industry but it has become a must due to Covid," he said. "It is now also a must for airlines and freight forwarders in order to improve efficiency and in turn to reduce costs and to increase revenue."
Petot said the company, which was launched in 2019, had recruited people with a range of expertise in air cargo — airfreight, technology, product, customer success and sales — in order to understand the needs and limitations of air cargo.
"This is an essential prerequisite: a platform created by air cargo people for air cargo people. That’s what we’ve done by recruiting experts in these fields, who have put in place the most effective solutions on the market."
He added: "Recruiting talented people who bring together exceptional professional and human skills remains our priority."
The platform's chief commercial officer, Mathilde de Rocquigny, has over 18 years of experience in airport and airline management, including at Air France KLM; its chief technology officer, Francois-Xavier Gsell, is a former solutions architect at Amazon and Microsoft; and chief product officer, Elena Volkova, was previously head of product and design at FCS Computer Systems.
Petot himself has more than 15 years of experience in air cargo at DB Schenker and Air France KLM.
"Currently, everyone who has joined the team (we have doubled our number of employees in six months) also has a similarly high level of expertise," he said. "We’re based in Singapore, but we have hubs in Asia, the US and in Europe."
He added: "There is high demand for digitalisation as airlines and freight forwarders are looking to improve efficiency and increase revenue. The technology and the digital aspects contained within CargoAi allow us to help our clients with their daily work and to simplify their processes, in particular by processing a much larger quantity of data than manual processing allows."
Petot said that CargoAi differed from other platforms as forwarders can book on 100% of airlines.
The company explained that airlines can offer live space and rates on the platform by connecting with APIs, which can then be accessed by forwarders through the portal; or the forwarder can make a single request and then CargoAi sends the request to all airlines and gets back to the forwarders.
Forwarders can also link their existing systems with CargoAi through APIs, removing the need to log into portal to access capacity and rates.
