Alrik, a logistics software provider operating in Sweden, is targeting European expansion, having raised €1 million in seed funding from global venture capital firm Pi Labs. The Stockholm-based company was launched in 2023 by seasoned operators Nici Sundén-Cullberg and Axel Enblad.
Nici Sundén-Cullberg, a former Morgan Stanley investment banker, was previously the CEO of challenger bank Lendify, which was founded in 2014 and sold to Nordic digital bank Lunar in 2021 at a valuation of $143 million. Axel Enblad was the CEO of Nordic fintech firm Fakturino before co-founding Alrik.
Alrik is tackling a global sustainability and productivity problem for material distributors to the construction sector, as transportation currently contributes 22 percent of the whole industry’s carbon footprint.
Despite the heavy reliance on logistics and transportation of materials to and from sites across the globe, processes and fleet management systems have remained largely analogue, manual and inefficient.
Monitoring emissions from point-to-point transportation enables developers and contractors to accurately measure emissions targets, while digitalising the logistic network significantly reduces project delay, delivery lead times and cost.
Alrik works directly with distributors to monitor and optimize emissions from construction deliveries through a single, unified platform; early users have reported reduced fleet emissions of up to 10 percent, with one customer seeing a 36 percent reduction in fleet cost after six months of use.
The SaaS provider already has over 100 customers, including many of Europe’s largest distributors, such as global building materials giant Saint-Gobain, northern European market leaders STARK Group, Kesko, Bygma, Mestergruppen as well as Swedish trade companies Karl Hedin and Woody.
Faisal Butt, Founder and Managing Partner at Pi Labs, said: “Innovation plays a role in tackling emissions at every touch point in the global construction lifecycle, and the logistics supply chain and transportation of construction materials has been hugely overlooked until now. As a fifth of construction’s Co2 emissions come from moving materials to and from sites, we see the global potential for an efficient, unified system to tackle fleet-wide transportation emissions, under the leadership of two seasoned operators like Nici and Axel.”
Nici Sundén-Cullberg, Founder and CEO of Alrik, commented: “Construction sites across Europe continue to grapple with uncertain lead times for materials from a countless number of suppliers and distributors, which hinders their progress. The distributors also need to manage their own logistics network, with a bulk of this still being done over manual phone calls, hand-written records and whiteboards. The lack of coordination leads to poor supply chain visibility, expensive fleet operations and stalled projects on the client side. Alrik effectively eliminates manual coordination with, in many cases, 100 different suppliers and distributors, and unifies the entire supply chain network to deliver projects more efficiently.”
The company previously attracted several business angel investors such as Apple iCloud veteran Olivier Bonnet, former Gorillas COO Adrian Frenzel, Klarna’s Camilla Giesecke, ex-Gumtree technology head Phil Chambers and various others.
