Portex

Footwork leads the Seed round in the smart freight management platform loved by a key unserved market: small- to mid-sized brands.

Back in 2021, a seasoned founder Mike had worked with for many years in the board room told us about another tenacious entrepreneur we had to meet who was going out to raise a Seed round, Brittany Ennix.

Brittany had cut her teeth as a founding member of Uber’s first global sales team, before joining Flexport. In her three years at Flexport she saw an opportunity to improve the freight procurement experience for a massive but effectively unserved market – small- to mid-sized companies –  through software. Working so closely with these shippers, she saw the headaches and cost of their manual procurement process and caught the itch to solve it herself. So she left to pursue her dream, and launched Portex, which is coming out of stealth today.

Portex is an intelligent freight procurement and management platform. Its workflow software eliminates the need for shippers to use emails, faxes, spreadsheets and phone calls for anything from one-off freight procurement to end-to-end freight management. More specifically, Portex enables brands to instantly communicate with any partner from a single interface, review bids and quotes from multiple partners to book the most competitive rates, review smart analytics and insights, and manage shipments until they’re complete. Portex makes this end-to-end workflow streamlined and painless thanks to automation and a customer-first interface. 

A glimpse of Portex’s product, including Portex AI.

The results speak for themselves: Portex has already enabled nearly $100 million of freight transport spend. Typical customers save 80% of their time spent on freight management and 30% on freight transport spend per year. Also promising: Portex is building with AI from day 1 to augment incredibly practical tools and multiply their impact further.

Working with Brittany and team, their secret sauce is obvious: unbelievable customer focus. Portex is obsessed with deeply understanding how brands actually work and want to work, and builds to solve their pain points accordingly. The outcome is a particular degree of customer love that you only see when a team is onto something special.

Check out a few words from customers, in industries ranging from food and beverage, to building materials, industrial equipment, and packaging.

A few of Portex’s customer testimonials. Full case studies here.

It’s no surprise Portex already has very strong retention in its early days. But workflow software is just step 1 in Brittany and Portex’s vision. Portex’s growth potential is massive, from expanding to offer a wide range of financial services for both shippers and freight providers, to growing globally.

The combination of SaaS, marketplace, fintech, and network effects, can help realize Portex’s mission: to enable companies of any size to access the same level of cost and efficiency savings that have already been unlocked for large companies, for a more efficient, transparent and competitive global trade ecosystem. 

We’re delighted to talk about Portex today, as they announce their $6.25M Seed round led by Footwork, with co-investors Cowboy Ventures, Susa Ventures, Base10, and angels. More on the story in this great piece in TechCrunch, as well as in FreightWaves and Journal of Commerce.

Working with Brittany and the team over the past few years has been a joy for us. Brittany’s energy is boundless and infectious; this, coupled with her deep and early passion for this space and her superpower in sales, has led to awesome progress for the business. More on that from Brittany herself in this blog post.

Portex is strategically hiring across engineering, marketing, operations, and sales. If you’re excited about leveling the playing field in global trade, please reach out.

Brittany and Mike at Footwork’s 2022 Annual Meeting.