Brittany Ennix first became interested in supply chains as a child.
Her grandfather worked for the Ford glass manufacturing plant, where she says he gave her an appreciation for the complexity of building something. When Ennix moved to Silicon Valley and worked for Uber and later Flexport, her fascination for the industry grew, until she had an idea for how make the supply chains more efficient for small and mid-sized businesses.
“Most of us don’t think about supply chains on a day-to-day basis, but they truly shape everything from what we can buy, where we can buy it, where we live, at what price, which is obviously very top of mind in this economy,” Ennix told TechCrunch.
Nearly three years ago, she started working on Portex, a company that allows small-to-mid-sized businesses (SMBs) to connect with freight partners and manage shipments and operations in one place.
A lot of software companies and startups already exist that help companies manage their shipping needs, a category called Transport Management Systems (TMS). But many of them are expensive and loaded with features smaller companies don’t need, Ennix says. This even though SMBs are responsible for somewhere around half of “the $4 trillion spent on freight every year,” she said. She launched Portex to create a TMS that would appeal to the smaller companies that haven’t adopted such systems.
“TMS is geared typically toward the biggest companies and has successfully helped them unlock a lot of time savings and cost savings and efficiencies in general,” she continued. “But for SMBs, the tools tend to be too expensive, cumbersome, and quite literally overkill.”
SMBs that don’t yet use a TMS lean on manual processes using emails, spreadsheets, and PDFs. Portex hopes to provide a more efficient management process to these SMBs — similar to how TMS works for larger companies. Ennix calls Portex more of an intelligent assistant platform, where they can handle everything related to freight management in one place, allowing companies to easily communicate with carriers and brokers through instant messaging. Portex can also be used to look up price quotes, secure competitive rates, and review automated analytics.
On Thursday, the company announced a $6.25 million seed round led by Footwork Ventures, with participation by Cowboy Ventures and Base 10.
“We’ve seen companies that are using us cut down over 25 hours a week on their manual freight task, along with being able to save up to 30% or shave off 30% of their annual freight spend, which can sometimes translate to millions of dollars,” Ennix said.
Ennix said she had a pretty smooth time fundraising for her company, as she was able to tap into the network she built up from her years of “grinding” in tech. She met her lead investor, Mike Smith, co-founder and general partner at Footwork Ventures, through another founder. Smith sat on this founder’s board and Ennix remembers her friend used to talk about how incredibly and thoughtful he was.
“So when it was time to raise the seed, it was a no-brainer for me to go hardcore to pitch Mike, because, at that point, he had started his own fund.”
“Portex immediately becomes a must-have tool for shippers who try it,” Smith told TechCrunch. “When I first met Britany, it was clear that she has the obsessive customer focus to successfully shape a product that solves real, pressing needs for a large segment that has long been overlooked by software builders.”
Portex will use the fresh capital to help it hire and expand throughout the world. Of course, there is also an impetus to lean more into artificial intelligence and Ennix says with the growing data set retrieved from all the bookings on Portex, the company hopes to use AI to make automation smarter, so it can include features from conversational prompts to suggestions on which carriers to use.
She thinks back often to her grandfather who, for four decades, worked at that glass plant in Nashville, teaching her how much intention goes into a single component of a final product. He would have her fix random objects around the house and build random things. She knew she wanted to start a company one day but didn’t know it would be in this space until she started working at the intersection of tech and logistics.
“My grandfather was a hero to me, and I like to think that he would be proud if he saw what my team and I have built today,” she said. “My vision for Portext is to become the intelligent management platform for every small-and-mid-sized company that’s moving freight around the world.”