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E-commerce sales experienced extremely strong growth rates during the pandemic. According to the German E-Commerce and Distance Selling Association (bevh), they rose by 19.4 percent year-on-year to €24.141 billion in the second quarter of 2021. This was despite the fact that the same period had already seen sales growth of 16.5 percent compared to the second quarter of 2019. The product categories with the strongest growth in Q2 2021 were DIY products and floristry (+37.3 percent), food (+34.9 percent), drugstore products (+34.2 percent), household and home textiles (+31.5 percent), and pharmaceuticals (+30.6 percent).
To ensure that all these goods reach the end customers, logistics providers are required to deliver top performance. This begins in the fulfillment centers, in the largest of which up to 72,000 parcels per hour However, such large fulfillment centers are not the right fit for the currently emerging Q-commerce market with its 10-minute delivery promise. For this, retailers need small, flexible warehouses that they can easily operate even in city centers.
Nano storage and picking helper
Noyes Technologies (from minute 3:35), the first startup we feature in this episode, offers exactly that. Its warehouses start at ten square meters and automatically retrieve stored products in five to ten seconds. The startup was only founded at the beginning of this year, but has already successfully completed seed funding and grown to over 20 employees.
The process within the warehouse, in which an entire order is put together from individual products, is called Picking or order pickingAnd the startup Nimmsta has made it significantly easier with its product. Usually, individual products are scanned and packed manually—a process that requires the picker to repeatedly put the scanner down if they want to keep both hands free. Nimmsta has placed the scanner, including the touchscreen, on a wrist cuff. You can learn more about the startup starting at minute 5:30.
Saving CO2 in logistics
Manyfolds In turn, has thought about what the goods are shipped in. Often, a parcel consists to a large extent of air or packaging material. Industry circles estimate an average of about 50 percent air in the package However, oversized boxes increase shipping and filling costs. They also fill up delivery vehicles more quickly, ultimately leading to more delivery traffic and higher CO2 emissions per package. Manyfolds aims to solve these problems with its on-demand, size-optimized shipping packaging. We reveal how far the startup has progressed with this starting at minute 7:45.
Also Smartlane (from minute 10:20) focuses on CO2 emissions in logistics, but approaches the problem quite differently. The startup's system collects and uses "smart mobility data" to enable dynamic order and route management. This allows delivery routes to be optimized in real time, saving fuel and CO2. Smartlane also enables customers to be precisely informed about changing delivery arrival times. Investors in Smartlane include Freigeist Capital, the investment arm of Frank Thelen, Marc Sieberger, and Alex Koch.
Vsqured Ventures
At the end of this episode we present the VC Vsquared Ventures The Munich-based venture capital firm is looking for European seed- and early-stage startups developing the "next big thing." You can hear about the groundbreaking startups the VC already has in its portfolio starting at minute 12:20.
