Freelancer.com acquires Channel 40, paving the way for the launch of Freightlancer.com, a new global marketplace for freight, shipping and transportation.
Freelancer Limited (ASX: FLN), the world’s largest freelancing and crowdsourcing marketplace by total number of users and jobs posted, has acquired Channel 40, an enterprise marketplace connecting freight owners with transport operators.
Channel 40 was started in 2016 by mining executive Tom Cavanagh, who also founded, and is CEO of, EMS Group, one of Australia’s largest underground mining and tunnelling service providers.
Channel 40 primarily services the construction, mining, tunnelling, rail and oil & gas industries, with over 6,000 freight operators in its marketplace. In the last 12 months, Channel 40 has shipped over $4.5 million of freight within Asia Pacific, as well as internationally to the United States and Europe.
“Today we are excited to announce both the acquisition of Channel 40 and the launch of Freightlancer, our global marketplace for freight, shipping and transportation,” said Freelancer.com Chief Executive Matt Barrie. “Freightlancer is powered by the world’s largest human labour cloud of over 30 million freelancers, our rapidly growing Enterprise division and our global payments business Escrow.com.
“The acquisition of Channel 40 and the launch of Freightlancer.com represent the first productized vertical for Freelancer.com, specializing in end-to-end solutions within a single job area. This builds on our Local Jobs offering and taps into the the Freelancer.com API, delivering a global pool of liquidity for the freight logistics industry, around the world,” Mr. Barrie said.
“We are thrilled to be joining Freightlancer,” said Channel 40 Chief Executive Josh Mullens. “Our business and global domain expertise in transportation, shipping and logistics, combined with the global scale of the Freelancer.com and Escrow.com businesses is a phenomenal combination.”
Manny Pereira, Chief Executive of MPC Global, said: “Getting our purchases to the United States through Freightlancer is always easy. The team there manage the whole thing for us, and I have never had a problem with our shipments.”
Benjamin Carter from Redpath Mining said: “We’ve been using Freightlancer.com to service our road freight needs across Australia, with our loads varying from one or two pallets, to multiple trailers. It is a great platform for obtaining competitive pricing at short notice. We’ve been able to move our equipment to where it needs to be at very short notice with competitive pricing.
“We've saved time and cost to move freight since using Freightlancer.com, and if not for the use of the platform, more time and effort would have been wasted obtaining competitive prices to suit our delivery requirements.”
