Nabu secures €1 million in funding to accelerate customs clearance and free logisticians from paperwork

Strasbourg, Wednesday, October 12^th 2022 – Nabu, the platform that connects logistics documents to business tools, announces their first round of financing (pre-seed) of more than one million euros from Maersk Growth, Techstars and several French and American business angels (including operators at Microsoft, AWS and LinkedIn).

The French startup, founded by Arnaud Doly and his team, has developed an AI-powered platform to accelerate the processing of shipping documents, starting with customs formalities. Their ambition is to free supply chains from paperwork and automate administrative tasks to increase efficiency, productivity and customer satisfaction while reducing costs and environmental impact.

Arnaud developed a keen interest in modernising supply chain workflow from his former experience in trade finance and document compliance review, where he witnessed first-hand how archaic the administrative processes of international trade are. Since then, he has constantly sought to improve them through technology, which led him to start Nabu.

"Manual entries are error-prone, slow, non-scalable and belong to a past decade", says Peter Votkjaer Jorgensen, Partner at Maersk Growth, and continues ", through automating data capture, we'll enable a very different experience for all parties involved. We took an immediate liking to Arnaud's vision and passion and look forward to working closely with the team on developing Nabu's platform."

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Expansion prospects in a rapidly digitising industry

With the funding raised, Nabu intends to finalise the development of its platform, implementing changes and improvements based on the feedback from its beta testers. The company will begin a recruitment drive to support this development by hiring several new people to strengthen and structure its technical and product teams.

“When we met Arnaud Doly, he quickly proved to be the type of smart and driven founder Techstars Montréal AI wants to invest in. He painted a very compelling vision of how Nabu could leverage AI to deeply transform how logistics companies handle shipping documents. More importantly for us as investors, Arnaud showed clear progress toward achieving that goal.” Bruno Morency, Techstars Program Director.

Over the next 12 months, Nabu will continue to invest in R&D to develop their proprietary AI-powered intelligent document processing algorithms and complete the development of the platform’s first version. The startup also intends to use the funds to engage with major international logistics players and respond to the global issues of international trade beyond France.

"The last two years' events have increased the pressure on an already tense international supply chain. Our mission to support logisticians in accelerating their administrative tasks by optimising document processing is stronger than ever. We are delighted to have such renowned investors who truly believe in our vision and what we have set out to do and to have partner companies so involved in the development of our platform," says Arnaud Doly, CEO of Nabu.

"There is a real desire for modernisation in logistics, but it's one of the most difficult industries to digitise given its complexity. Therefore we hope our simple and flexible approach will be well received," says Arnaud.

About Nabu

Nabu frees logisticians from paperwork and accelerates administrative tasks. Combining artificial intelligence and an intuitive interface, the platform optimises the processing of documents related to the transportation of goods, starting with customs clearance. By creating intelligent logistics data flows, Nabu enables international trade players to be more efficient, competitive and environmentally responsible.

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About Maersk Growth

Maersk Growth is the Venture Arm of A.P. Moller–Maersk – with the mission to digitise, democratise, and decarbonise supply chains. We invest in and partner with talented startups, scaleups, and visionary innovators. We support our portfolio companies' strategic potential and generate value for A.P. Moller-Maersk by leveraging our core capabilities – our 'ABCDE' or Assets, Brand, Customers, Data and Expertise.​

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About Techstars

Techstars is an operational investor supporting you on your entrepreneurial journey from idea to building the most successful business possible. Built and run by entrepreneurs themselves, we understand the complexities of putting your ideas into actions and scaling them. Since 2006, Techstars has invested in more than 3,000 companies and today has a market cap of $75 billion.

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