Scandinavia is a fertile ground for innovation and the logistics sector is no exception. Here at Milkman, we love to be “situationally aware” and register in our database all the interesting companies we read of or come in contact with. Three of them, wildly different from each other, stemmed from the cold north of Europe.
The usual disclaimer: this is not a list nor a chart. If you feel that your company is worth a mention drop us a line and we’ll oblige as best as we can.
Nimber was born in Norway in 2010 and is one of the oldest sharing-economy driven delivery companies operating in Europe. More: Nimber is one of the true “sharing-economy” companies, not relying on a fleet of underpaid drivers but effectively using spare resources for the collective good. Their motto is: “Ship anything, anytime, anywhere. With someone going your way anyway”. That’s as simple as it comes: you have a bulky item you need to be delivered somewhere, you decide how much you’re willing to spend and find someone who has space in his car/truck and was going near your delivery address anyway. You solve a problem for much less than it would have taken by calling a traditional courier and they get something for their trouble.
Nimber operates in the UK too, through its offices in London and has added headquarters in Greece and the USA (but we don’t know if it already operates in these countries). Last May it has teamed up with meat, egg and poultry producer, Nortura, to provide direct deliveries to customers in the Oslo region. “This is our first move into the attractive and growing “last mile” delivery space where traditional retailers need new delivery models to provide more cost-effective, convenient and sustainable delivery solutions”, noted Ari Kestin, Nimber’s CEO.
Budbee comes from Sweden and has recently collected €3 million in funding from investors, including H&M CEO Karl-Johan Persson. It’s a Startup that deals with home deliveries, offering time windows, guaranteeing a maximum of +/- 20 minutes span on the selected time of arrival, sporting the possibility of following the driver in real-time and chatting with him.
Couriers and sellers can register for the service and Budbee, which has no fleet of its own, will assign shipments and routes, taking care of all the optimization and monitoring of the proceedings.
Denmark contributes to the international freight market with Transporteca, born in 2012 and launched in 2013, it “saves businesses time and money by making it easy and quick to compare and book international shipping online. It is free for the user and a booking can be completed in a few clicks”.
It has been created by logistics experts coming from A.P. Møller – Mærsk and functions as a less than container load freight booking platform. This is Flexport’s hunting ground and it’s going to be interesting to see how many players will get to share a potentially enormous market in sore need of innovation.
