The startup rebuilding the least glamorous - and most fragile - link in global trade: the truck that meets the ship.
A shipping container can cross an ocean in choreographed precision - scheduled to the hour, tracked to the mile - and then stall at the port waiting on a truck. That gap between the quay and the warehouse is the first mile of land freight, and for decades it ran on phone calls, paper slips and trust between people who knew each other's voices.
Haulio was built to close that gap. Founded in Singapore in 2017 by Alvin Ea and Sebastian Shen, the company is a digital container haulage platform: software that connects shippers, freight forwarders and logistics firms to a community of container hauliers, then coordinates the booking, the tracking, the billing and, increasingly, the financing of every move.
The pitch is deceptively plain. Haulio does not own the trucks. It does not replace the hauliers. It gives a fragmented industry a shared set of tools and lets the network effect do the work - roughly 800 trucking companies and about 10,000 first-mile vehicles now transact an estimated 2.3 million twenty-foot-equivalent units of cargo a year through the platform.
That focus - on the unglamorous middle of the supply chain rather than the ocean legs everyone else digitises - is the whole thesis. It is also why investors like PSA, ComfortDelGro and Temasek's Heliconia Capital wrote checks.
Container haulage in Southeast Asia is highly fragmented. Thousands of small trucking operators, each with a handful of vehicles, serve ports through informal networks. Capacity is invisible, empty runs are common, invoicing is manual, and a shipper booking a truck might make a dozen phone calls to find one. Delays at the first mile ripple through the entire supply chain.
Shippers, freight forwarders and logistics companies who need containers moved on land - and the container trucking and haulage firms who move them. Haulio sits between the two, turning many small operators into one addressable, interoperable network.
Book container trucking in one place instead of a dozen calls. Track containers in real time, with status updates at each milestone of a booking. Pull reporting and analytics on daily operations. Handle e-billing and payments through an integrated portal. And, for hauliers, tap embedded financing, faster payouts and truck leasing without leaving the ecosystem.
Haulio occupies the first-mile, port-adjacent layer of logistics - upstream of warehousing, downstream of the ship. It is infrastructure the rest of the supply chain quietly depends on.
Connects shippers and forwarders to hauliers with booking, real-time container tracking, milestone status updates, reporting and analytics.
A regional alliance of ~800 trucking companies and ~10,000 first-mile vehicles that share capacity and interoperate through the platform.
Integrated e-billing and payments that make invoicing straightforward for hauliers' operations and finance teams.
Supply-chain financing and faster payouts via Funding Societies and Aspire, plus prime-mover truck leasing via ComfortDelGro and Goldbell.
Most logistics software chases the visible parts of freight - ocean bookings, global forwarding, last-mile delivery. Haulio went the other way, specialising in first-mile container haulage and integrating deeply with port operations through backers like PSA. Rivals such as Kargo, Ritase and Waresix built broad trucking marketplaces; Haulio built a focused, port-anchored haulage layer for Southeast Asia and layered finance on top.
The distinction that matters: Haulio didn't build a trucking company. It built the thing that lets hundreds of trucking companies act like one.
Haulio is a B2B platform - part SaaS, part logistics marketplace. It monetises haulage transactions across the network (revenue scales with TEUs moved) and adds value-added services: embedded financing, leasing, e-billing and payments sold to hauliers, shippers and forwarders.
Third-party estimates put annual revenue around US$5.6 million, on a team of roughly 34 people - a lean operation for the volume of cargo it touches.
Alvin Ea (Co-Founder & CEO) and Sebastian Shen (Co-Founder & CPO) started Haulio in 2017 after seeing how technology could transform a highly fragmented haulage ecosystem. Their wager was that digitising a trust-based industry is a relationship problem before it's a software problem - and they spent years earning the haulier community's confidence.
Humility. Honesty. Heart. Hunger. Hustle. The values that shape a logtech company operating inside a traditionally analog trade.
| Round | Amount | Year | Key backers |
|---|---|---|---|
| Seed / Angel | Undisclosed | 2018 | Supply Chain Angels, PSA unboXed, 500 Startups |
| Series A | US$7M | 2022 | Heliconia Capital (Temasek), Ondine Capital, Cornerstone Ventures, FuturePlay, XA Network |
Alvin Ea and Sebastian Shen launch in Singapore to digitise fragmented container haulage.
Angel and strategic backing from Supply Chain Angels, PSA unboXed and 500 Startups; the haulier community network takes shape.
An early-stage pilot starts with PSA JV partner ESCO.
Temasek's Heliconia Capital leads a Series A round with global investors.
Deepens its Thailand footprint (150+ firms, 3,000+ trucks) and partners with BBTruck for end-to-end supply chain logistics.
Port operator and early investor; integration with port operations and JV partners such as ESCO in Thailand.
Leasing of prime-mover trucks to hauliers on the network.
Fintech partners providing supply-chain financing and faster payouts.
2024 partnership integrating BBTruck's supply-chain platform with Haulio's haulage services for sea-to-shore logistics.