Pamyra

Pamyra.de is targeting small B2B senders as well as private senders. These senders typically want to focus on other things than shipping and transactional costs of current solutions are painful.
Pamyra.de went live in post-beta version in Nov 2017. We already compare more than 100 freight forwarders. Customer adoption is great: the platform is growing at +35% m/m. In May we acquired more than 230 new customers (more than 100 B2B).
We are now raising a Seed Round of 800k, tickets 50k - 400k.

Economic rationale / Business Model

Booking a transport of heavy goods today is a real pain, particularly for SME businesses and individuals without a contractual relationship with a freight forwarders (B€ market).
Transactional costs for booking a transport are immense on both sides, for senders and freight forwarders. The market is highly opaque with unjustified price differences among providers of often 30% or more for the same service. Yet, for customers, the very high effort of checking availability and comparing prices often outweigh gains to be made, as price requests are typically handled via e-mail or phone.
Freight forwarders on the other end, typically answer 8-10 price requests to receive one order.

Pamyra.de solves this problem elegantly with efficiency gains for both sides: On the website Pamyra.de customers enter their shipment and receive prices for all available services including extra services offered and the name of the provider. Comparing prices and booking becomes a matter of minutes rather than hours.
Freight forwarders see Pamyra.de as a self-sufficient digital sales channel. They receive new orders without additional phone calls. Some partners already offer 20% lower rates on Pamyra.de than for call-ins.

We take a commission of each order.

Financing details

Project financing secured: EUR 0.500 million (50 %)

Financing source: Private

We are raising a seed round of 800k at a pre-money valuation of 3.2 M€

400k are already committed by current investors, a family office with strong logistics background and 2 business angels.

We are looking for 1-3 more investors to join the round. The ideal investor brings one or more of the following to the table:
- experience with marketplace startups
- knowledge / network in logistics
- helps to internationalize to neighboring countries (from Germany)
- network to Series A investors

Existing or potential bottlenecks for the realisation of the project / Potential risks

The first challenge was to convince freight forwarders that transparency is not to be feared (or at least cannot be avoided). This was a very tough one, but we now have prices for 100+ partners online.

Current challenges are modeling complex situations / customer requirements in the digital processes and getting the right data from our partners - sometimes even they don’t have them. Here we need to hire more developers to move faster.

An external risk is the current shortage of truck space.

Project additional information

We have one important advantage over most of our competitors who are currently out there which is engrained in the business model: We are positioned as a *partner* of existing freight forwarders, not as their competition. This allows to access their resources on the logistics side of the equation.
We believe that in a huge, complex market, chances to succeed are the highest, when everybody does what he/she does best. There are 14.000 freight forwarders in GER alone. They know their business. And we know "online"... 
With a top-notch team of IT & e-commerce experts, online marketers, and entrepreneurs we focus on bringing the missing ingredients to the market: customer centric UX, lean "e-commerce"-like processes and true transparency.