Portcast bets AI can see 90% of world ocean trade without a tracker in every box

A 'next-generation logistics operating system': real-time container tracking and demand forecasting for manufacturers and freight forwarders.

That logistics can run on prediction: fusing satellite, weather, economic and transactional data to track and forecast shipments without IoT in every container.

$3.2M pre-Series A led by Newtown Partners through the Imperial Venture Fund, with Wavemaker Partners, TMV, Innoport and SGInnovate.

Nidhi Gupta, who held Asia leadership roles at DHL, met machine-learning PhD Lingxiao Xia at Entrepreneur First in Singapore and saw logistics inefficiency as the opportunity.

Serving clients across Asia and Europe, Portcast traced a European food company's 70-day Taipei shipment that took over three months and pinpointed why; its data absorbed shocks like the Suez Canal blockage and Brexit's port effects.

IoT trackers are cost-prohibitive per container, so Portcast infers positions and delays from satellites, wind, waves and port data instead.

Prediction beats raw tracking for planning: naming a delay's cause and likely length turns logistics from reactive to schedulable.

COVID-19 made digitisation urgent, shifting supply chains from a cost centre to the core of delivery promises.

When the obvious solution is too expensive at scale — a tracker in every container — the edge is inferring what the trackers would have said.

As of 6 September 2021 Portcast served clients across Asia and Europe and was using part of the new funding to expand into more markets.