Shanghai-based startup Duckbill has raised USD 50 million in a new financing round led by Temasek and joined by Pavilion Capital, as well as existing investors such as Future Capital and Shunwei Capital, the company told KrASIA on Wednesday.
Founded in 2017, Duckbill operates an app for truck drivers to take transportation orders, similar to how ride-hailing services work. It helps companies to move their containers on land, separating the goods into smaller orders for drivers to fulfill.
Duckbill, which started at the Shanghai port, expanded to Ningbo in 2018, and later to Taicang, as well as Shenzhen and Qingdao, transporting a total of about 700,000 containers last year alone. The firm also offers cargo loading and unloading services and says it now has about 6,000 corporate clients, up from 5,000 in September last year when it bagged USD 30 million in a pre-Series B round.
“Duckbill has integrated demand and supply in an innovative way and has significantly improved efficiency in the industry, getting extremely good feedback from both clients and drivers,” said Li Zhengwei, executive director of Lighthouse Capital, which was the dealmaker for this financing round.
Read this: Duckbill’s digital freight-matching platform offers stability in a chaotic logistics industry: Inside China’s Startups