Good morning, good afternoon, or good evening. Welcome to the 90th Emerging Growth Conference, day two of our two-day virtual investor conference. I'm Ana Berry, your host. A few notes for those attending today, we're running until about 4:30 P.M. Eastern. When we switch to the next company, you'll see a black screen for a moment. If you do experience downtime, just refresh your browser. Our platform does work best on Google Chrome. If you're watching from an Apple device, you have to hit your play button to start the session. Now, during each company's presentation today, you can submit questions through the webcast module. We will attempt to address as many of these as possible at the end of the presentation. All of our conferences are uploaded to the Emerging Growth Conference YouTube channel. Please subscribe: youtube.com/emerginggrowthconference.
One last note, after today's event, you'll be redirected to the registration page for our next conference, so stay on or come back to reserve your spot early. Happy to begin with Freightos Limited. They trade on the Nasdaq under the symbol CRGO, and is the leading vendor-neutral global freight booking platform, where airlines, ocean carriers, thousands of freight forwarders, and well over 10,000 importers and exporters connect on Freightos, making world trade efficient, agile, and resilient. Happy to welcome the Chief Strategy Officer, Ian Arroyo, and the CFO, Pablo Pinillos. Welcome to the conference today. We're happy to have you both.
Thanks, Ana. It's great to be here.
Thank you.
All right, Ian, I'm gonna start with you. For investors who are new to the story, how do you describe Freightos? Maybe a few moments of the origin story? Describe what structural inefficiency in global freight are you solving?
Sure, thank you. Freightos is really the digital infrastructure layer for international freight. Global freight is approximately $600 billion industry a year, and still over 90% of bookings still happen offline via email and spreadsheets, phone calls, and in some cases, even fax machines. That really creates a structural inefficiency, opaque pricing, very slow procurement cycles, fragmented execution, lots of manual overhead across carriers, forwarders, and importers and exporters, which we call shippers, and we solve that by connecting all three sides of the market, so the carriers, the forwarders, and the shippers on a single digital platform. We provide SaaS tools for procurement, rate management, quoting and benchmarking, and then also operational execution, and a transactional marketplace for real-time bookings and payments. We're really not just a booking interface, we've become the digital backbone of freight procurement and execution.
We embed into the daily workflows of the industry, improving the decision-making cycles, and turning what used to take many days into minutes. The structural inefficiency is the manual disconnected workflows, and the solution that we're providing is an embedded API-driven and AI-enabled digital infrastructure.
Well, I'm assuming the freight market is massive and historically offline and relationship-driven, so why is now the right time for digital booking, like you mentioned, and digital distribution to scale?
Yeah, it's a great question. As you know, I think we all recognize, as we read the news every day or watch our X or Twitter accounts, volatility has really become permanent. Between geopolitical shifts, you know, COVID kind of kicked it off six years ago, tariffs, capacity swings, rate volatility, international freight is really no longer a stable commodity. In Q4 alone, of 2025, we saw continued booking growth, even in a very subdued pricing environment. When volatility increases, the value of transparency, speed, and benchmarking really increases, and so digital tools and platforms really aren't optional anymore. They're operational risk management tools, if you'll think about it that way. I think secondarily to that, right, carrier infrastructure has really matured over the years.
You know, back in 2019, 2020, many of the carriers, both ocean and air, were still using AS/400 green screens from the 1970s. Today, we're integrated with airlines that, you know, represent almost 80% of global air cargo capacity, and ocean carriers are beginning to bring their capacity and pricing online, and procurement is also digitizing, right? All of the infrastructure and piping now exists to enable shippers and forwarders and carriers to operate in an online manner, just like they do in travel or banking or other industry verticals. Lastly, and maybe even more importantly, shipper expectations have shifted, especially in the large enterprise shipper world. Forwarders and shippers expect real-time pricing, real-time data benchmarking, and automated procurement.
Procurement teams have become increasingly focused on how do they index link contracts, or how do they refresh their rates in a more dynamic way, and that behavior structurally favors a digital platform. You know, in freight, it's not so much a trend that digitalization is happening, it's really a delayed inevitability. You know, Freightos is six years into that compounding adoption, and we're seeing it, you know, pick up even more and more speed now that the black swan is now just a swan on an everyday basis, if you will.
It seems like you've built meaningful scale in the digital air booking, so what drove adoption on that side of the market, and what does it tell you about, in general, how digitization spreads in freight more broadly, specifically now?
I mean, over 24 consecutive quarters, we hit, you know, quarter-over-quarter record transactions, reaching 445,000 in Q4 of 2025 alone. The adoption model really follows a very clear and logical sequencing. That sequencing is, we built solutions or SaaS solutions and tools that supported workflows in the forwarder space. Those workflows really embedded into daily operations. Those embedded workflows created kind of deep habit, and that habit then created liquidity, and liquidity really drove scalable transactional value for both the forwarders and the carriers. Importantly, like, 98% of new lanes booked last year in 2025 on the Freightos platform, came from carriers who were already on the platform.
That tells you something, I think, very critical, which is that growth comes from utilization and workflow embedding, not just from adding new logos. I think the broader lesson here is that you don't force transactions at the start. You really have to win the workflow battle, and then transactions flow as a lagging indicator of value. That, that really is driving our strategy as we move into 2026 and beyond.
With that said, as you expand beyond a single mode, how should investors think about Freightos evolving from just a booking interface into a broader operating system?
Yeah, great question. Historically, Freightos has really focused on the spot market, which is somewhere between 40% and 50% of the volume that goes through the market every year. You have spot and contract. Contract is, as you would expect, it's freight under contract, and Spot is bookings that are made and quoted on the spot. Historically, right, we were focused mostly on the spot market until a couple of years ago. We acquired SHIPSTA to really begin the process of adding on the contract side of our strategy. Now we're embedding really deeply into procurement and contract workflows, linking tenders directly into the execution model. That closes the loop between kind of the pre-planning and then the operational side.
Then, as you were asking the multimodal question, right, air and ocean, we're moving from being a very strong and mature air platform to being a multimodal platform, and we're bringing, you know, our strong air leadership alongside with our ocean platform, which we announced middle of last year, and that is focused on the SaaS side, the solution side, the workflow side first, right, rating and quoting. We do expect bookings to begin in 2026, but to really truly become meaningful on the booking or transactional side, at the end of 2027 and into 2028. Very much focused on SaaS first and embedding those workflows in the forwarder, as we discussed previously. Air really proved the model for Freightos, right?
Ocean and tender are structurally larger markets, we're expanding our leadership from the air side into the ocean and into the procurement and tendering side as well. A lot of folks have tried to, let's say, you know, pigeonhole us into being simply a digital booking interface. I think that that's incorrect. We're really a unified operating system for procurement, pricing, quoting, benchmarking, and then also bookings and payments as a lagging indicator of value. I think it's important just to remember, right, it's a modular, API-driven, AI-enabled, and we're embedded into the transportation management systems, the ERPs and carrier systems, of, you know, the carriers, forwarders, and shippers. That increases switching costs, and lowers marginal CAC and really strengthens retention for us.
Talk a little more about that, operating a marketplace and a growing SaaS data business. How do those pieces?
Sure.
R einforce each other and, most importantly, bring in revenue?
Sure. This is really the core of our strategy. We talked about this a little bit in our earnings call earlier this week. Solutions revenue today is about 2/3 of our total revenue, and platform revenue or transactions is about 1/3, and it scales with usage. I think the reinforcing loop really works kind of as follows, right? SaaS embeds into workflow. The embedded workflows increase retention and share of wallet for Freightos. Solutions customers book materially more than free users. It's about 3x more than our freemium users, and we talked about that in the earnings call as well. That higher utilization drives greater transaction growth, and then the transaction data improves our benchmarking, our AI models, our pricing intelligence, and then that kind of increases our SaaS value.
How does that kind of reflect onto the revenue side? It really reflects onto the revenue side in three ways: higher retention, higher LTV through expansion, and then operating leverage over time. Our path to break even in Q4 of this year is really structured from kind of a 50% operating leverage and 50% structural cost discipline, and we're deliberately prioritizing our SaaS adoption in 2026 because it really drives near-term unit economics and long-term transactional growth. It's not a pivot away from transactions, it's really the most disciplined way to scale them. I think another piece of this that's super important to remember, right, is we're the only platform in the freight industry that is connected to the carrier world, the forwarder world, and the shipper world.
It really is a double-sided marketplace and a triple-sided network, and that's a strong moat, right? It's easy to say, "Oh, you know, you can build, you can build software very quickly with AI." Yes, fine. Admittedly, yes, you can, but the network piece, the integrations to the, you know, the three sides of the network, is very difficult to replicate. It takes many years, and as you said, this is a relationship-driven business. It takes many years to build that kind of a moat and that kind of a network, and we think that that's a strong competitive advantage for Freightos.
With all of the tariffs, volatility, and shifting trade lanes, talk a little bit about your resiliency in this market.
Yeah, look, if you look at, you know, the kind of the historical evolution of platformification in the market, whether it's in travel or in finance or in other verticals, volatility really drives platformification usage. For us, volatility is reinforcing the value of what we've built over time. Freight is increasingly shaped by tariffs, as one might imagine. I mean, just look at kind of the reactions to SCOTUS repealing the IEEPA tariffs last week. Geopolitical shocks, the Red Sea crisis, capacity, you know, dislocations, shifting trade corridors. In that environment, companies really need 3 things, right? They need speed, they need transparency, and they need decision intelligence as quickly as possible. Our model is really resilient for a few structural reasons. First, going back to something you said earlier, we're really workflow embedded.
We're not rate dependent. I think that that's a vital kind of structural piece to the value prop. Even when pricing volatility moderates or trade flows shift, you still need to procure, you still need to benchmark, you still need to quote, and you still need to execute on that freight. Our solutions sit inside those workflows, and retention remains solid even through elongated enterprise sales cycles. That tells you we're not just a discretionary capability, we're really an infrastructural and operational capability. Second, volatility really, you know, kind of increases our value because as tariffs are refunded or changed, as we're seeing right now, it creates a lot of operational complexities, and accounting, you know, friction for shippers, for forwarders. In those moments, the benchmarking data, the procurement automation, the real-time bookings become much more valuable, not less valuable.
For instance, in Q4, even with subdued pricing in many corridors, we still delivered record transaction growth, 27% year-over-year, which we talked about in the earnings earlier this week. That's really evidence that adoption's not really tied to rate spikes, it's tied to workflow utility. You know, lastly, I would say our diversification, improves resilience now that we're talking about not just spot, but spot and contract, air and ocean and trucking, procurement and execution, and, market intelligence. That kind of multimodal, multilayer, positioning really reduces dependency on any single trade lane or a specific pricing environment. When markets are stable, digital improves efficiency, yes, but when markets are volatile, digital really improves survival.
Thank you, Ian. Pablo, you've outlined a clear path to break even by Q4 of 2026, talk about some milestones to get there and how investors should be thinking about growth.
Yeah. Thanks, Ana. Ian touched a little bit before about that. Our path to break even in Q4 this year comes from mainly roughly 50% from operating leverage growth, meaning we will continue to grow. We will continue to grow our solutions business and the transactions business, which much more focus on the solutions side, as solutions first to be more embedded. That will drive the revenues for us to get to break even in a 50% to get there. The other 50% will come from a structural cost disciplines. What that really means, we will get there really, really through prioritization, accountability, and focus on initiatives that improves our unit economics and provides durable growth in the short term.
You know, we have to structure our cost base and operating priorities so that break-evens remains achievable within the guidance that we have provided. We expect more automations in costs, you know, that will mainly start to impact us at the end of Q2 and for the second half of the year and some infrastructure savings. The expectations is that the costs will be flattening or even slightly going down through the year, you know, and some OpEx cost reductions are expecting from the investment in certain products, markets, and marketing strategies, you know? We will be investing in different markets and divesting in other markets, that will be the result of some cost reductions and deinvestments.
Let's talk about three to five years out, Pablo. What does success look like for you all?
Well, we have a clear vision. The vision for us is to be the world's leading freight platform that connects forwarders, carriers, and shippers. That's clear. That's clear, our vision, and that's what we are working to execute towards, you know? If you look at the three-way platform and then or two-way platform with three main stakeholders, like the carriers, the forwarders, and the shippers, the important thing is to create that flywheel that works with them, you know, and be really embedded into their day-to-day activities, you know?
What that success looks like in three to five years, you know, we get more type of transactions, LTL, oceans continue to grow on air, at the same path. We get more combinations of buyers and sellers, so that the platform liquidity and the connections between the buyers and sellers gets more sticky, and we provide the sufficient value for them to continue that growing, you know. More connectivity to data and systems, that means that we get more embedded into their workflows. We are critical for them in the day-to-day activities. They take the right solutions with the right decisions, with the right data at the right time, you know? We touch more aspects of every transaction.
At the end, everything that we do in the that will make us successful in the following three to five years will be that we are really the player that provides the value to this market, and we are embedded, and we success to be able to be the leading freight the freight platform.
Perfect. With that said, can you talk a little bit about what percentage of the global freight market is currently digitized, and how do you estimate Freightos' achievable share over the next three to five years of that?
Sure. I can take that. The actual market is around for air and ocean, is like about $600 billion, you know, in the freight market. Two-thirds of that is ocean, and 1/3 of that is air. You know, right now, it's around 9% of that is digitalized, you know, and only 2% of that is in a platform, you know. That's how the market looks right now, and there's a huge opportunity to grow that market, you know. From a market share perspective, the question is, okay, so if you look at to how we have been extremely successful in the air side.
If you split between contracts and spot, we are really focused on the spot because contracts is a long-term agreement between the carriers and the forwarders, and they are not in the capacity yet. In that 50%, we have right now in our platform, around 80% of the carriers that are in our platform has around 80% of the global capacity worldwide, and we are around the 15% of that is spot capacity as a market share right now. There is a huge opportunity to grow there. Ian, do you want to add something to that?
No, I, as we talked about, you know, as Pablo said, Ana Berry, and also from earlier on, right, we've been focused mostly on the spot market until recently. You know, now we're looking at the entirety of the market, both ocean and air, contract and spot. The market share opportunity is tremendous and, you know, if you look at the growth, our transactional growth in air over the last six years, and you think about what's gonna happen in ocean, with ocean really being the lifeblood of global freight, as it comes online, as its capacity and bookings come online, right?
There's just tremendous market share opportunity, and, we're the only, you know, current platform in the market that's both embedded into the freight forwarding, workflows, as well as connecting, to the carriers to enable them to reach their forwarders in real time like that.
Can you talk on what is the gross margin profile for each segment you mentioned, and how does management plan to improve overall margins?
I would say that we don't disclose the gross margins by segment, and we haven't disclosed it, but I can tell you that we have a long-term model that our gross margins for the following five years has to be between the 70%-80%, where if you look at the historical gross margin, we have been improving that year-over-year, and we will get and we will continue to do that.
Who are Freightos' main competitors, and what's your differentiating factor?
Ian, you want to take that one?
Pablo, would you like me to take this one?
Sure, please.
Yeah.
Go ahead.
I think that, Ana, it's a good question. I think you have to break us down by the segment that you're talking about, so carrier, forwarder, and then importer, exporter. On the carrier side, let's say that on the carrier side for air specifically, we have two competitors, cargo.one out of Germany and CargoAi out of France. cargo.one's about five to six times smaller than we are, and CargoAi about eight to 10 times smaller than we are. In ocean, folks would probably consider somebody like Descartes, which is a legacy software on the rate management side, Freightify out of India, Okargo maybe. In general, right, on the carrier side, there is we're not competing with anyone from a platform perspective, both ocean and air. You have to split air and ocean apart.
On the forwarding side, we definitely compete with a Freightify, right, which is a rate management software out of India, Portrix, which is a legacy rate management platform. Again, from a kind of ocean, air, and booking capability plus market intelligence, right, there's, again, no one is competing kind of in all of those segments. You have to look at the kind of the niche piece and break it apart. On the importer-exporter side, in procurement, we compete with, you know, your standard procurements, softwares like SAP Ariba or JAGGAER or Coupa, even though those are kind of generalized procurement. Many enterprise clients use those even to procure freight, even though it's highly specialized. In the freight procurement specific, you know, space, we compete with folks like Transporeon or Keelvar or Archlet.
In market intelligence, we compete with Xeneta, Drewry, and NYSHEX.
Okay, thank you for that. Talk about what barriers to entry protect Freightos' marketplace and data products?
I'll go back to something I said earlier, which is, it's really about the network, and then the fact that we're deeply embedded into the workflows of our clients. This isn't just a transactional platform where, you know, I'm working on Booking.com, and tomorrow I wanna work on Expedia, and the next day I wanna work on, you know, Skyscanner, and there's zero switching costs. We're deeply embedded into the workflows of our clients every day, right? We're end-to-end, right, whether it's procurement moving into operations moving into market intelligence, and then feeding that back into procurement. So that's one, and two is the network, right? As Pablo and I were both alluding to, you know, the fact that we've got, you know, over 100 carriers in air, ocean, and truck, right?
You've got 4,000 forwarders connected to the platform and, you know, as you said, over 10,000 importers and exporters. That network takes many years to build, and we've spent the last 15 years building that reputation, that trust across the network, and you're not gonna replicate that overnight, right? It's gonna take quite a bit of time. Even if there are competitors that are coming into the space, it's gonna take quite a bit of time for the network, right, to adopt. For us, it's continuing to be customer-obsessed, value-obsessed for our customer, whether that's the carrier, the forwarder, or the shipper.
How does the company balance revenue between its platform, with the transaction booking fees and the solutions, and which is expected to grow faster?
Pablo, you want me to take that?
So-
Or you wanna take it?
Yeah, go. No, go ahead. Go ahead. I was gonna answer, but go ahead.
I was just gonna say, you know, Ana, that that goes back to, you know, the what is our focus kind of in 2026 and 2027. We talked about this a little bit in our earnings call strategy section, right? Which is we're really focused on solutions first, because solutions are driving, you know, higher transactional volumes. It makes transactions more sticky, right? We mentioned that, you know, our transactional users, who are, you know, paying solutions or SaaS customers, book 3x more than the average freemium user. Our focus is really on driving greater SaaS adoption across contract, spot, air, ocean, market intelligence, getting more deeply embedded into that workflow.
As the ocean liners, you know, bring more capacity online and as the air carriers pull more capacity back from their third-party providers, we expect those transactions to just naturally grow as a lagging indicator. Pablo, go ahead.
Yeah. No, no, I was gonna say that. Also from a growth perspective, well, our taxonomy right now from a, from that is 2/3 solutions, 1/3 transactions, as Ian mentioned at the beginning. This year, transactions will continue to grow at the same levels as before, you know, an overall growth of the company will combine both of them to be, from a guidance perspective, between 6%-12%.
Perfect. Well, thank you, gentlemen. I wanna give you a minute or so for closing remarks for all of our viewers today.
Yeah.
Who wants to go first?
Sure. I would say, you know, First of all, thank you very much for, you know, having us here today. We really appreciate the opportunity. I would say in closing, right, just as a reminder, international freight is a $600 billion industry. It's largely offline, and that inefficiency creates friction for importers and exporters or shippers, carriers and forwarders, Freightos exists to really solve that problem. We've built the only platform that combines SaaS tools, data, and multi-sided marketplace.
Today, it powers over 1.5 million bookings a year, connects over 75 air carriers, ocean carriers, and even more trucking carriers, thousands of freight forwarders, and over 10,000 importers and exporters across the globe from some of the biggest brands and love to a mom-and-pop selling on Amazon for the first time. The business is really scaling with strong gross margins, clear profitability by the end of 2026, and the cash to get there. Our vision is simple, be the indispensable digital backbone of global trade. We're already proving it, transaction by transaction, customer by customer. For you, the investors out there, this is really a durable, capital-efficient growth story in one of the world's largest industries that's still offline, and honestly, we're just getting started.
Thank you for having us, and we look forward to speaking with the investors who are interested.
Perfect. Well, thank you, Ian. Thank you, Pablo. We appreciate your time today, and we certainly look forward to following along with your journey into the year.