Artyom Shostak
Head of Growth
Urbantz has been listed third in Deloitte’s “2020 Fast 50 Ranking.” The competition is aimed at Belgian technology companies who have shown incredible growth in the last several years. This achievement doesn’t happen overnight. In order to be at the top of the game, for the last five years, Urbantz’s team has been pushing the product to a new level of last mile management software, and clearly, that hard work has paid off.
We sat down with Jonathan Weber, CEO and co-founder of Urbantz, to get his insights.
What drove Urbantz to the TOP 3 of Deloitte’s rating, with an incredible 2.204,47% of growth?
Urbantz has been growing strongly in the past few years by offering a solid product in a fast-growing market. To give you an analogy, last mile today is similar to the food delivery market in 2013-2014, when Deliveroo and UberEats revolutionised the food delivery process for restaurants and consumers. Today we’re doing the same for retailers and logistics providers.
What helps Urbantz stand out is an extensive product R&D roadmap focused on the needs and requests of our customers.
Talking of that roadmap, how do you expect the last mile market to differ in 2021? And with that difference, what are Urbantz’ plans for 2021?
The market has seen short term disruption in its digitalisation journey in 2020 as sudden operational pressure due to COVID-19 has taken precedence. At the same time, this has put the home-delivery opportunity in the spotlight, forcing retailers and logistics companies to speed up the implementation of omnichannel models and, as a result, the digital transformation of the last mile.
In one year the market has shown the change in the mindset, which normally, some of analysts were expecting to take 5 more years. This will fuel a strong acceleration to digitalise last mile operations in 2021 and beyond.
What are three stand out moments for you and for the company in 2020?
2020 has been special for everyone, to say the least. The first lockdown has seen a spectacular rise in food delivery whilst freezing all non-food operations. The latter have recovered since then and general delivery volumes have sky-rocketed across the board. This has allowed Urbantz to secure strong funding to finance its rapid growth.
We also opened a new office and have grown our team by 30%, but almost immediately had to learn how to onboard new employees and work together remotely.
Despite all the challenges, the main outcome is to see where we were in 2019 and where Urbantz is today. Talented people are joining Urbantz to continue building the best last mile software solution in Europe and with some of the largest retail and logistics customers joining us in 2020, I can say we’re on the right track
