Cargo Chat: cargo.one’s Claussen talks industry digitalization

MIAMI — The air cargo industry is catching up to other sectors and progressively becoming more tech savvy when it comes to digitalization, Moritz Claussen, founder and co-chief executive of digital booking platform cargo.one, said. [caption id="attachment_57288903" align="alignright" width="300"] Moritz Claussen, founder and co-CEO of cargo.one. (Courtesy/cargo.one)[/caption] Cargo.one offers cargo capacity with dozens of airlines, including: Lufthansa Cargo ; IAG Cargo; American Airlines Cargo; Air Canada Cargo; LATAM Cargo; Etihad Cargo ; ANA Cargo; Air France KLM Martinair Cargo Turkish Cargo; and Qatar Airways Cargo. The tech company has also signed deals with some of the industry’s largest freight forwarders, such as Schenker in August 2024 and Kuehne+Nagel this month. Claussen sat down with Cargo Facts at the CNS Partnership Conference in Miami this week to discuss digitalization in the air cargo industry and the progress that has been made in modernizing the sector’s technology. What follows is an edited version of the conversation. Cargo Facts : To what degree has digital booking proliferated into the air cargo sector, especially compared to pre-pandemic? Moritz Claussen: Just by the sheer number of airlines that have signed up to partner with us, I think it's a whole different world. When we started out in 2020, we had about ten airlines on the platform. Those were early movers. Those were airlines that were already set on the digital strategy. Today, we work with about seventy-five airlines globally. ... On the airline side, it's seen a massive uptick. And I think what we've seen over the past couple of years is that the product that we've built on the forwarder side of things has really developed a lot. We've invested a lot to make this a lot more of a value proposition, beyond just the search, compare and book with airlines. They're all betting on this to take off and, at the same time, we see booking volumes growing massively on the platform — obviously because we've got the supply, we've got the demand. CF : The air cargo industry has lagged a lot of other industries when it comes to digitalization. What do you think has caused that and do we overcome it? MC: It’s the mindset, “Hey, we've always done it that way. Why would we change it?” And I think that's more prevalent in industries where you may not see a massive influx of external people. This industry is very global, but it's very small. It's the same people, and so it's not a lot of influx of new people. And that's great in some parts, but it's also holding us back in others, because we don't necessarily get the newest stuff coming to the industry. But we've seen that change massively through COVID, where suddenly real-time availability and all of that became a massive thing. And also, [having humans performing certain job] didn't work as well anymore. And it's hard to get talent into companies. No one wants to do a stupid job anymore. They all want to do stuff that's cool. And so, doing emails all day is maybe not considered that cool, and so I think freight forwarders have come under a lot of pressure to innovate the way they also do things internally to get the talent to join them. CF : This change needs to come from not only the big freight forwarders, but small and medium-sized businesses as well. How much of your business is catering to SMBs right now? CM: Roughly half of our revenue is coming from SMBs and half is coming from [large] enterprises. It's pretty evenly split. There are a few very big players in freight forwarding that own a good chunk of the market, but it's always been very important to work with small and medium-sized freight forwarders. If you look at our platform, the way it's built and designed, it feels like a B-to-C product. It feels like you're going on Kayak.com and booking your personal flight. That very much caters to smaller freight forwarders, to the people who work there. CF : When it comes to the large customers you build APIs for, do you have issues making your new technology compatible with the industry’s outdated tech stacks? MC: We've been talking about ONE Record for I don't know how long, and the reality is, most people don't even use XML. They still use EDI. So, they're not even the standard before, but like the standard before that. It is a problem. On the airline side, it's been a big problem. In 2018, there was no airline out there that had an API, where we could just connect it. We built these APIs, famously, with Lufthansa, which was the first one to bring them online, and the same occurred with most airlines over the years. Today, that's changed a little bit. Technology has evolved a lot today. While I think it's great to have the concept of a standard, the reality is, you can build really good products with [collaboration] around modern technology, well-documented technology, and you don't need to necessarily have a standard. We've integrated seventy-five airlines. They all work and are integrated on roughly the same data structure. Lufthansa might have a slightly different structure to American’s air data structure ... but because technology is rather compatible today and we understand the use case as well, that works quite a lot. So, we've almost built a de facto standard without having gone to everyone in a theoretical kind of environment, and said, “Hey, let's sit down and write all of this up.” And I think that has worked quite well. And we see that obviously freight forwarders are continuously upgrading their systems. A lot of them now work in [logistics platform] CargoWise . We've had strong and good integrations into CargoWise. There's a lot of plug-and-play as well at this stage. See all the coverage of Cargo Facts EMEA 2025 from earlier this month.

Cargo Chat: cargo.one’s Claussen talks industry digitalization

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