Morocco’s Startups Bring International Fleet Management Into the Digital Age

As a key facilitator of intercontinental trade, Morocco plays a critical role in the global logistics space.

Home to Africa’s largest port by cargo capacity in Tangier Med, numerous shipping routes connect Morocco to Spain at the only land border between Europe and North Africa. This gives Morocco a unique position in trade corridors between the two regions.

While the country’s maritime heritage is among the richest in the Mediterranean, in the modern era, freight networks extend over sea, road, rail and air, with importers and exporters increasingly expecting the seamless movement of goods between them.

See also: Freight Platforms Show Buoyancy on Land, Sea and Air

Against this backdrop, a number of logistics tech startups have emerged from the North African country in recent years, with many of them specifically geared toward smoothing international shipping and managing cross-border freight transport between Morocco and its trade partners.

One of the most successful startups to emerge from the country’s logistics sector is CloudFret, a transport and logistics company founded in 2021 to connect truck loaders and carriers.

CloudFret uses artificial intelligence (AI) to detect empty cargo vehicles traveling between Europe and Africa, connecting them with goods that need to be transported and helping to minimize wasted space on the trucks that travel between the two continents every day. In May, the company raised $1 million in funding to help it expand further in African and European markets.

In an indication of the truly international scope of Morocco’s freight hubs, local startup and transport management software developer Freterium recently closed a multi-million-dollar funding round to help logistics companies across Africa and the Middle East optimize their operations.

Read more: Transport SaaS Startup Freterium Raises $4M in Seed Funding

Taking an overview of the whole ecosystem, Freterium has built a freight management platform that helps shippers better collaborate and orchestrate logistics networks that span multiple countries and delivery modes.

Commenting on the funding at the time, Cyril Collon, general partner at lead investor Partech, highlighted the potential for improvements to the freight industry in Africa and the Middle East.

“We have been looking closely at the freight trucking market in Africa and the Middle East for the past 5 years […] 85% of the volume is carried through established legacy partnerships between shippers and carriers and still runs with manual, inefficient tools,” Collon said.

Related: Tech Boosts Efficiency Throughout Supply Chain

Morocco’s Fleet Management Startups

Logistics is certainly more than just trucking and freight, and the process of moving down the food chain and handling last-mile delivery services increasingly relies on vans, cars, bikes and mopeds. Here too, Moroccan startups are developing tech-based solutions to optimize efficiency across logistics networks.

Learn more: No Pause for Logistics’ Last-Mile Digital Overhaul Despite Freight Rate Drop

For example, Track Prime’s fleet management solution gives managers oversight over their entire vehicle fleet, with tools for vehicle tracking, fuel consumption analysis and geofencing. This means that from international freight routes to local delivery networks, businesses have the data needed to optimize their logistics operations and manage vehicle-related expenses.

In a field known as telematics, solutions like Track Prime use a combination of in-vehicle GPS units and fleet management software to track vehicles on a computerized map in real-time.

Alongside Track Prime, other telematics innovators have emerged from Morocco’s startup ecosystem in recent years, including Geo4Net, Synapsis KS Morocco, GPSFan and 7 Days Techno.

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