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Xeneta providing rate transparency in turbulent ocean freight market

Benchmarking company raises $28.5 million to expand operations to provide more ocean and airfreight intel

Xeneta raises $28.5 million in a Series C round. (Photo: Jim Allen/FreightWaves)

Xeneta co-founder and CEO Patrik Berglund said providing ocean freight rate transparency is more important now than ever.

“In today’s [pricing] market, this spread is the most I’ve ever seen in my entire career. In this industry, it’s flabbergasting to see that. We have a market where you can find a $15,000 rate and then at the same time, we have customers moving for $2,500. That is just insane to see,” Berglund told FreightWaves. 

“Let’s say you have a low-value commodity. If you have a container with $20,000 worth of cargo in it, if the cost to ship it has gone to $15,000, they cannot even move those products anymore. If this market stays elevated for a longer period of time, there will be some consequences coming from it,” he said.

Oslo, Norway-based Xeneta, an ocean freight rate benchmarking and intelligence platform, announced Thursday it has closed its $28.5 million Series C round led by its first U.S. investor, Lugard Road Capital, with participation from past investors Creandum and Investinor. 


The company has raised a total of $49 million since 2012 and now is valued at more than $130 million.

Berglund said the company uses a crowdsourcing approach to bring transparency to the rating of ocean and air shipments.

“We started crowdsourcing shipping rates by going to the [retailers],” he explained. “We would get their freight prices and then we would aggregate that. … Today we have about seven of the 10 global forwarders and three of the five largest shipping lines so there’s plenty of use cases for [customers] to understand how the market moves.”

Berglund described how this price transparency now enables Xeneta’s customers to make better shipping decisions and improve the services that freight forwarders are offering their customers.


“The beautiful thing about transparency is that it forces you to focus on value-added services rather than just price,” he said. “In today’s market, I think it’s valuable for shippers whose logistics spend is through the roof. How do you justify those budget increases? Are you in line with [your peers] or not?”

Funding details: Xeneta

Funding roundSeries C
Funding amount$28.5 million
Lead investorsLugard Road Capital
Secondary investorsCreandum, Investinor
Business goalsExpand into new regions, in-house data analyst team, develop commercial and technical partners
Revenue run rateNot disclosed
Revenue targetsNot disclosed
New revenue run targetsNot disclosed
Pre-money valuationNot disclosed
Post-money valuation$130 million
Total funding$49 million

Berglund plans to use the new funds to expand to new regions, add an in-house analyst team and develop partnerships to bring more insight to the ocean and airfreight industry.

“We’ll stay on course with our mission and a big part of the investment is going to go into adding more data but also complementary data sources,” he explained. “Not only do we do pricing today, but we also have partnerships that allow us to provide insight on capacity, reliability as well. We will definitely continue to extract more intel from our own data. That’s an opportunity that we’re looking to tap into as well.”

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Grace Sharkey

Grace Sharkey is a professional in the logistics and transportation industry with experience in journalism, digital content creation and decision-making roles in the third-party logistics space. Prior to joining FreightWaves, Grace led a startup brokerage to more than $80 million in revenue, holding roles of increasing responsibility, including director of sales, vice president of business development and chief strategy officer. She is currently a staff writer, podcast producer and SiriusXM radio host for FreightWaves, a leading provider of news, data and analytics for the logistics industry. She holds a bachelor’s degree in international relations from Michigan State University. You can contact her at [email protected].