Shipping a container from Asia to Europe has long meant phone calls, PDFs and faxed customs forms. In 2016 a handful of Berlin founders decided that this was a software problem. They called their company FreightHub.
The founding team mixed operators and investors. Michael Wax became chief executive. Erik Muttersbach and Ferry Heilemann were co-founders, and Fabian Heilemann, also a partner at the venture firm Earlybird, took the chairman's seat. Wax studied at Technische Universität München, and Ferry Heilemann is listed as a WHU graduate. Beyond that, little is public about how they met or what they gave up.
Fabian Heilemann credited industry partnerships, constant innovation and a culture centred on efficiency.
The first product was modest. It sold spot-priced full container loads to small and mid-sized businesses, the customers the big forwarders treated as an afterthought. A shipper could get a price online and book it. By late 2017 Northzone had led a $20M Series A.
Progress came in steps. A $30M Series B arrived in May 2019, with the shipping giant Maersk's venture arm among the backers. That is a quiet detail worth noticing. The industry the startup wanted to change put its own money in early, which gave Forto access to knowledge and relationships that a pure software company would struggle to buy. By then the name had shifted from FreightHub to Forto.
Then came the pandemic freight boom. In June 2021 SoftBank Vision Fund 2 led a $240M round that valued the company at $1.2bn. About 2,500 customers were using its digital tools. Fabian Heilemann credited industry partnerships, constant innovation and a culture centred on efficiency. A second round followed in March 2022, $250M led by Disruptive at a reported $2.1bn valuation, almost double in eight months.
What happened after is the harder chapter. The freight market that lifted every forwarder in 2021 fell hard, and valuations built in that moment depend on the next cycle. Total funding is variously reported between roughly $360M and $600M, and revenue has largely stayed private.
For a founder, the useful point is where Forto aimed. It did not try to replace the shipping line. It took the paperwork around the box and made that fast and clear, and let the incumbents become partners instead of enemies.