Go99, a digital freight-matching marketplace based out of Vancouver, Canada, has achieved a major milestone of reaching over $1 million in revenue and 1,500 users registered in third quarter, it announced. It is now planning to scale with its sights on the rest of Canada and busy lanes into the U.S. The start-up connects shippers, asset-based carriers, and freight forwarders over a single platform while bringing transparency and visibility into the freight supply chain.
“We have broken through a thousand users just in the province of British Columbia. This might not be that much in the grand scheme of North America, but is a big deal in a province like BC,” says Devlin Fenton, the CEO and co-founder of Go99.
And with the growth in revenue and user base, the company is expanding its team – both on the technology and operations front. “We aim to automate the process of planning and arranging logistics, booking loads and paying for services, we aim to ease the entire burden for both shippers and carriers.”
Currently, the company’s service density is focused on western Canada, between British Columbia and Ontario. It also sees a lot of increased traffic down the Pacific Coast, from BC through Washington to Oregon. “In some cases, we even see some members who want to move freight down to California and back, from California to the Lower Mainland of BC,” notes Fenton.
Apart from scaling up on an operational level, Go99 has also started collecting robust data on every component of the shipping transaction – from the movement of commodities and its volumes, to whether carriers are responding to fluctuations in gas prices. “We have collected data on thousands of such loads, commodity volumes, lane rates and can start sharing this information with parties who see value in this data,” adds Fenton.
When questioned about the size of fleets that the start-up prefers to work with, Fenton says that Go99 targets smaller fleets, anything from an owner-operator with a single truck to fleets of up to 25 trucks.
“Our platform provides operational support for smaller trucking companies, and that is everything on the front end,” he explains. “With Go99, they don’t need to do the same amount of business development and sales like the bigger fleets. Nor do they need a lot of back-office support for invoicing and fee collection. We do it all for them.”
On the shipper side, though, Go99 does not have a size limitation and strives to provide value in the form of visibility and transparency to every level of the shipper demographic.
“Simply, what our platform does is increase efficiency in the transport industry by removing middlemen while retaining the value in every network,” says Fenton. “We don’t aim to replace networks, but we are aiming to make the current networks more transparent and less costly in time and money.”
The most significant differentiator of Go99 against its peers is its pricing strategy. In comparison, the start-up’s business model is truly disruptive, with carriers submitting a price directly to shippers, thus eliminating the need for a fixed pricing model from the start-up.
“Our business runs on a financing model, rather than a fee for a transaction or a subscription model. Our primary business is financing the transactions that take place within the ecosystem,” says Fenton. “As a value-add service we will also offer data (business intelligence) to users to improve their decisions via a subscription.”
“We pay our carriers the very next day through our NextDayPay policy and go and collect from shippers on terms. We have seen the carrier’s reported per mile rates increase by 2.6% in Q3. This is something that we anticipate will continue to increase as we remove the middlemen and build more trust.”
Go99 is now entering into symbiotic partnerships with service and product vendors based on the common goal of providing value. “Such partnerships would help us provide solutions to our biggest demographic of users, both small and medium-sized businesses. This includes everything from finance, insurance, and fuel to docks, documents, and data,” concludes Fenton.
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