Haulio, Singapore’s largest and Southeast Asia’s fastest growing digital haulier, announced Tuesday that the company will be securing its first overseas acquisition with a controlling stake in Logol, a Jakarta-based logistics-focused technology platform.

Strategically acquiring Logol will help Haulio secure an early stronghold in the Indonesian market and expand the group’s business beyond haulage to include other integrated digital logistics solutions that Logol currently offers, Haulio said in a statement.

Logol, which was founded in 2018, was the first logistics technology player to integrate its platform with not only Indonesia’s largest and busiest port, Port of Tanjung Priok, but container depots and terminals as well.

Logol has effectively removed cumbersome intermediaries and data entry redundancies, enabling both shippers and hauliers to be connected to key nodes within the supply chain ecosystem such as ports, customs, shipping lines and container depots.

“Our unwavering goal from the get-go was to transform and elevate the haulage industry through digitalisation, and whilst we have succeeded, we recognise there is still a lot of work needed to digitalise this traditional sector that faces similar productivity issues across the region,

“We strongly believe acquiring Logol will fast-track our growth by increasing our regional fleet coverage by another 2,000 first-mile vehicles. Likewise, Haulio’s track record as a leading digital haulier in Singapore and Thailand will help to drive growth and wallet share for Logol’s haulage arm in Indonesia,” said Alvin Ea, Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder of Haulio.

In addition, the merger of both companies, will enable the group to broaden its digital services beyond the trucking play. Key nodes such as terminals and container depots across Southeast Asia remain cash and paper intensive.

Therefore, Haulio aims to recreate Logol’s successful technology integrations in various hyper-localised settings that are unique to this region and will set new, world-class standards that are currently lacking through technology for the first-mile container logistics sector.

This venture was supported by Enterprise Singapore (EnterpriseSG), who has been working closely with Haulio to formulate its acquisition strategy in new markets to accelerate its growth and achieve its vision of expanding and deepening its footprint across Southeast Asia.

With the support of EnterpriseSG, Haulio has also signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the Centre of Excellence in Modelling and Simulation for Next Generation Ports (C4NGP) which is part of the National University of Singapore College of Design and Engineering (NUS CDE) to jointly develop and commercialise the Smart Haulage Scheduler (SHS).

This first-of-its-kind haulage scheduling solution is set to enhance productivity in the nation’s logistics sector.

Following a successful Series-A funding round led by Temasek’s Heliconia Capital earlier in 2022, Haulio has since expanded and deepened its footprint across Southeast Asia.

The first-mile container logistics market in Southeast Asia is worth $70 billion and Haulio is already present in the key markets of Indonesia, Singapore, and Thailand.

With its unique strengths in the container haulage arena, Haulio will adopt a rapid land-and-expand strategy to establish a complete regional first-mile haulage coverage in Malaysia, Philippines and Vietnam next.

With the objective of driving increased productivity for the Singapore haulage industry, Haulio will work with C4NGP to develop the Smart Haulage Scheduler (SHS), a dynamic haulage scheduling algorithm.

Haulio also aims to tackle the industry issues with scalable Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) technologies, coupled with an Open API architecture that the haulage community can adopt to their existing processes.

The SHS scheduling algorithm will enable a fleet’s controller to make optimal planning decisions for a list of incomplete jobs at any time in a day, taking into consideration evolving traffic and weather conditions in real time.

Existing Transport Management Systems (TMS) in the market can also take advantage of the SHS to enhance their current operations.

Concurrently, Haulio will debut the newly built Haulio’s Payments Portal (HPP), an integrated e-billing payments platform that serves to alleviate the tedium of financial logistics in the hauling sector, which currently requires meticulous manual entries of invoicing, tracking and the follow-up of bills.

With HPP, hauliers can view their end-to-end haulage management process, and gain a comprehensive overview of invoices with various statuses immediately which would greatly speed up the billing process of hauling jobs.

To elevate micro to small haulage business owners, the HPP will soon be able to enable early pay-outs, allowing hauliers to have better control in managing their working capital.

Haulio began as a two-person team in 2017 and has since grown to a team over 100 employees strong in Southeast Asia today.

As Haulio continues to develop, the organisation expects to increase their regional technology and product team headcount by double in the next three years and will continue to create higher value-added job roles in the industry such as software engineering, product management and data science that will elevate the industry’s way of operating as current roles continue to be redesigned and augmented.

Singapore logistics firm Haulio secures $7M investment led by Temasek’s Heliconia Capital