Unlocking a Global Gateway — Why We Invested in Trella
When MV Ever Given ploughed into the bank of the Suez Canal in March 2021, the world was reminded of the importance of this Victorian waterway. A century and a half after its opening, the Egyptian canal still accounts for 10% of all the world’s trade and remains a key gateway for global oil. Some of the most important ports in the world are located around it.
To maximise the canal’s strategic benefits, each of the countries in the MENAP region (Middle East, North Africa and Pakistan) is developing more modern road infrastructures to move goods inland. However, their efforts are being undermined by a fragmented, antiquated trucking industry. Egypt itself is planning a series of new free trade zones around the canal but the inefficiency of its trucking industry poses a major challenge.
This is where Trella comes in. Trella is a Cairo-based trucking marketplace spearheaded by two ex-Uber employees, which connects shippers to carriers in real time and addresses the region’s shortcomings using dynamic pricing, GPS tracking and transparency for all parties.
Maersk Growth has just completed an investment in Trella, and in this post we want to explain the reasons why we invested: the problem Trella is solving, the brilliance of their solution and the synergies with the wider Maersk brand.
But first, let’s look at the specific challenges in the MENAP region.
Most of the carriers in MENAP have less than five trucks; in Egypt, over 90% of trucks are independently operated. These small fleets remain reliant on old-fashioned, manual processes to connect with shippers, and this creates inefficiency. The vast majority of trucks still return empty during their backhaul journey, which adds up to hundreds of thousands of empty miles and gallons of wasted fuel.
Because the carriers struggle to find high-grade shippers themselves, brokers are free to slice hefty cuts from their fees but offer little in return. This ramps up load prices to prohibitive levels (it’s currently three times more expensive to transport goods in Egypt than the U.S.), and undermines trust and transparency all along the chain.
At the same time, shippers need several hours to find a suitable trucking firm and less than 1% of loads are currently GPS-tracked, which leaves them no way of monitoring shipments in real time. On top of their high margins, some brokers can frustrate shippers with their poor quality of service, which manifests itself in a lack of dedicated support or data insights.
The experience of Trella’s founders makes them ideally suited to disrupt this industry.
Omar Hagrass and Ali El Atrash, two of Trella’s co-founders, were among Uber’s first employees in Egypt and have plenty of experience in disrupting the transportation and logistics space with game-breaking technology.
Omar helped transform the food delivery market by establishing UberEats across EMEA; as regional head of product launch and later Shared Rides, Ali introduced scooters, motos and buses as an alternative to taxis.
Together with Pierre Saad, a former software architect at digital healthcare platform Vezeeta and Muhammed El Garem, an experienced business development leader, they have built a digital middleman which connects shippers to carriers in real time — and removes the need for traditional brokers altogether.Done
With Trella, shippers can lodge a request in seconds and carriers can bid for these requests via a digital marketplace. Trella facilitates the entire process with an automated matching feature which ensures carriers receive the right requests for their capabilities. In addition, a real-time tracking service enables shippers to follow a delivery throughout its journey.
Each side receives its own benefits. Shippers profit from the consolidation of trucking capacity, transparent pricing options and visibility of their loads from start to finish. Carriers, meanwhile, can access top shipping firms at a single click, optimize their fleet and unlock value-added services such as carrier financing, a feature which went live in 2020.
For both sides, the Trella platform provides simplicity where previously there was clutter and time-consuming manual processes, which led to miscommunication and frustration. Using technology, Trella removes the barriers to transparency and provides a better experience for the end customer.
The early results are excellent. In less than two years, Omar, Ali and the team have graduated from YCombinator, the startup school whose alumni include Airbnb, Reddit and Dropbox. They’ve secured more than 350 shipper partners including blue-chip brands like Coca-Cola, Nestle and FedEx, onboarded over 15,000 driver partners and expanded into Pakistan and Saudi Arabia — all during a global pandemic.
Now, Trella has completed a $42 million Series A round, including a significant investment from us at Maersk Growth.
With our focus on companies that solve the pain points of logistics through digital technology, we found Trella to be a perfect fit.
Our existing portfolio already includes several investments in the road transport space, such as Loadsmart, Ofload and Torch. While each of these startups has its own recipe for success, they all have a common goal: to address the legacy issues within road transport, the manual, opaque and analogue processes that create risks and inefficiencies in customers’ supply chains. This space has long been ready for digital disruption, but this is even more true in very traditional and relationship-based markets in Africa and the Middle East.
Trella is our first-ever investment in this region and we believe it is a crucial milestone, one that will help to transform the market and make supply chains everywhere more efficient.
We also see great synergies with Maersk’s own strategy. In 2019, Maersk started its journey to become the global integrator of container logistics, connecting the entire supply chain and delivering efficiencies at every point. The development of the inland logistics portfolio is crucial to achieving this vision, and the MENAP region, with its economic significance, will play a major role in this.
The local Maersk teams have long found MENAP’s fragmented, non-transparent trucking industry an obstacle to growth. With Trella and its tech-based solution on board, we can continue our evolution and streamline processes across the whole MENAP area.
Working together with Omar, Ali and the rest of the Trella team, we believe we can solve major customer pain points by allowing shippers to find and book trucks more easily, moving cargo on time with full end-to-end-visibility, and tracking shipments accurately.
Now, it’s about delivering on these aims — and that means rocket fuel!
We often talk about our ‘rocket fuel’ — the value we can provide as part of Maersk, a global brand with vast amounts of data and manpower at our disposal. Now we want to give Trella the benefit of this stimulus to help them unlock their full potential.
Having created a strong foothold in Egypt and successfully expanded to Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, Trella is now focused on strengthening their position in existing markets and developing their product. But they won’t stop there — Trella’s vision is to create a genuinely international footprint and deliver a better experience for shippers and carriers everywhere.
By leveraging our industry experience, existing transport volumes, and people on the ground with local expertise, we can support their ambitious goals and get one step closer to reducing supply chain inefficiencies.
Closing off — Now lets reinvent trucking!
If you want to partner with Maersk Growth to build sustainable logistics systems and facilitate global trade, feel free to send your pitch to dealflow@maersk.com or reach out to any of the authors of this article
