SeaAhead Catches up with Petere Miner, Co-Founder/President of CoLoadX
CoLoadX was founded in 2015 in Queens, NY by logistics and software professionals Fauad Shariff and Petere Miner. Using digital logistics software, CoLoadX has created a container shipping marketplace to more efficiently procure and more effectively track the movement of e-commerce products.
Interview by Matthew Larkin, Spring Intern at SeaAhead, Bentley University '21
What inspired you to start CoLoadX? What was the opportunity that you saw in the ocean freight industry?
My positions in the logistics industry have always been focused on supply chain. I really love logistics shipping because it deals with the last point of contact before the customer receives their product. Logistics shipping is so much a part of the customer experience and there's something about that that is profound for me. But enabling technologies for global transportation services haven’t always been available, so I started CoLoadX with this real intent of finding way to bring to bring technology to the industry in an intelligent way that could better match supply and demand.
When we started CoLoadX, we were really intent on this idea of making it easier for an entity to buy freight with either financial instruments or just as a simple marketplace like Amazon or Travelocity. We decided to start with ocean freight because 90% of the world's goods are shipped by ocean. The chairs we’re sitting on, the food we ate this morning, all of that came on ocean vessels someway, somehow, whether it was raw material or finished goods. The ocean is the unsung hero of the supply chain – it drives the global economy.
What are the next big steps for your company – how do you see the value of CoLoadX’s services progressing?
It’s an incredible time to be doing what we’re doing, because the industry is at a tipping point. There is now enough technology for the industry to tip and become fully digitized and automated. But there is also a huge explosion in the global economy because of covid and we’re seeing that many ports are backed up because they are already processing as many container ships as they can – this is true not just in the US, but in Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and all around the world. There’s this crushing demand for capacity.
So, it’s a great time to for us to figure out a way to do everything more efficiently because there’s a real thirst in the industry to start shipping in smarter ways – to really use data, analytics, and other digital functionalities to address these problems. We really think this is a great opportunity for us logistics companies to have our heyday.
As the ocean freight industry runs up against this tipping point, what are some complementary innovations in the ocean freight industry that CoLoadX would benefit from? How are you helping catalyze these changes?
Over the last 10 years the infrastructure and technology around the industry has really intensified. Now we've got the cloud, we've got API's, we've got blockchain – all sorts of technology now that is available to anybody. So the real challenge in the industry now is to come up with functionality.
One of the things that we're now stepping into is the issue of visibility, of never knowing where your ocean freight is and not being able to figure out what to do if there is a problem. What's really missing in our industry is the tracking of the movement of goods, but the industry is slowly getting to the point where, technology wise, we can use machine learning and AI to figure out how to optimize that movement and enable visibility. The next step for CoLoadX is to partner with companies that are providing IOT visibility and analytics services with a strong data backbone to be better analyze our marketplaces.
What sustainability principles are most important to CoLoadX and how does your business model make an impact on these principles?
When you look at the circular economy, which is the movement of goods either to be recycled or reused in different ways, all of that requires transportation, and particularly when you look at the tail end of the circular economy, the recycled plastic fabrics and other materials, all that stuff ships by ocean. We've been involved with multiple shipments of recycled plastic, where the challenge is that the value of the material is less than the cost of the freight, which creates this weird pricing dynamic where certain players are taken advantage of. So, part of our main sustainability principle is to create a more efficient way to be able to move all material around the world, including the stuff that's part of the circular economy.
What’s been most difficult aspect of starting your own company in the ocean freight industry?
The industry traditionally is very competitive and very zero-sum game, where the bigger you are, the mightier you can be. What's happened, thanks to the internet and innovation, is a real movement towards a common set of values. There's no longer one company that essentially dictates how things happen, but a collective of different organizations that provide different pieces of the puzzle to make it all work together, which is much more viral than dictated.
Lastly, what has been the most rewarding aspect of founding your own company? What have you appreciated the most about the journey to get to where you are today?
Well I think you have some startups that really want this frenzy of growth and some startups that really want to solve a problem. It's the engineer in me, but I think it’s super important to start your company based on a real problem, and in my case it's making life easier for my customers. Right now, if my customers want to find out how much it's going to cost to book something they have to make some phone calls or send some emails, or maybe they've got a spreadsheet somewhere, maybe there's an online tool, but there's really no easy way for everybody to just find it and book it. So for me, the most rewarding part has been talking to customers and seeing their shock and awe when they use our service.