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Flexport Is Silicon Valleyβs Solution To The Supply Chain MessβWhy Do Insiders Hope ItΒ Sinks? 
Forbes
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Some internal employees are upset because the new round of funding seemingly pushes out our IPO. I do 100% believe the company will IPO but it probably won't be for 2-3 years.
The company is waiting for shipping prices to normalize (prices went from $2k/container pre-pandemic to $20k/container at the height). Higher prices inflated revenues for 2021 and the company did post a profit in 2021 (+$37M). Without the inflated prices the company would have still been in a really solid spot on the balance sheet and with a healthier balance sheet than a lot of the publicly traded mid-tier tech employers like Uber, Airbnb, DoorDash, etc.
As another user posted, the company could definitely get to a $50B+ company. The industry for freight forward itself is ~$1Trillion and no company holds > 2% market share. They have a unique value proposition and could become the market leader (current leader has ~$16B revenue). They've grown from $670M > $1.3B > $3.3B over the past 3 years.
To my knowledge there are a few different software solutions currently out there -
(1) 3rd party software from companies like Project44 (startup focused on supply chain visibility) and GT Nexus (owned by Infor, this is more traditional 'enterprise' software like you might see from someone like Oracle, at least that's my impression).
(2) Companies will employ their own supply chain teams who take the data they're getting from emails and spreadsheets and manually upload the data into their Warehouse Management System or ERP system.
(3) Flexport and other freight forwarders who are now building their own software. A good example of a Flexport competitor who does this would be Expeditors.
So how is Flexport different?
#1 - We are working to externalize our tech in 2022 so that clients can use our platform to track all shipments (not just those done by Flexport). This allows us to compete with solution (1) above. Most of these 3rd party software companies are going to have issues with higher acquisition costs to get people onto their platforms. We have a large established user base and we've been dogfooding our own product for 8 years now to get to this point where we're now ready to externalize.
#2 - We have built public API's that integrate with WMS and ERP software which allows us to compete with solution (2) above. If these types of companies switch to Flexport they can probably slim down their internal supply chain teams and save money.
#3 - We are further ahead with our product and features than our freight forwarding competitors. Expeditors is considered possibly our biggest competitor with a similar-ish offering. I'm pretty sure they didn't start building any digital solutions until 2017-2018 and at that point they were already a 35-40 yr old company. So we're 4 years ahead with our platform and we're a smaller, much more agile and scrappy company that was built with org design around software development vs standing up a software development division in a 35 yr old company.
#4 - Our data. Some other companies are working towards similar capabilities but they haven't been doing it for as long so we're just further ahead. When you look at things like freight container capacity or show rate for freight bookings we just perform better than our competitors because we have better data. Most freight containers usually sat around 70% capacity pre-pandemic and we use ML to get those containers closer to 100%. We also have strong relationships with the ocean liner carriers because we have a higher show rate than competitors. Something like 16% of ocean liners bookings were no shows because companies would cancel shipments after bookings (these are pre-pandemic numbers). So the ocean liners would overbook their ships in anticipation of this. Flexport's show rate was closer to 95% which strengthens our relationships with the carriers because we give them better predictability. I'm sure there's a lot more here but that's what came to mind off the top of my head.
Obviously I have the kool-aid mainlined into my veins and feel strongly about the future of the company. This is my 4th 'tech startup' I've worked at and the 1st one I've had strong conviction on about high growth potential. The market fragmentation makes it extremely attractive in terms of growth and I think once we do IPO that it could be a huge upside stock.