Online shoppers can track orders the moment they’re placed, shipped and delivered. That kind of visibility along the supply chain — from a product’s beginnings in a factory to its final destination on the shelf — is vital for freight forwarders and importers to be efficient in the international shipping industry, Matt Motsick said.
For the past 20 years, one Hong Kong-based software company has been providing real-time data to freight forwarders and importers, mostly based in Asia. With Kansas City entrepreneur Motsick now at the helm, Swivel Software is launching its software to clients across the world from his Lenexa headquarters.
Motsick invested in the company a few months ago, when it was named Paradigm Corporation, he said. After rebranding the company and taking over as chief executive officer, Motsick now hopes marketing the software specifically to U.S. customers will open a new vertical for the firm.
The software company is Motsick’s latest enterprise. About a decade ago, he co-founded Catapult International, a digitized freight rate management system that tracks global rates in near-real time. He left the Lenexa-based company in September.
Partnered with Amazon Web Services, Swivel Software boasts solutions designed to increase visibility and transparency along the supply chain, enabling freight forwarders to become more efficient in international shipment planning and execution, Motsick said.
“We’re helping companies go digital with how they move goods,” he said. “Before, it was a lot of emailing and phone calls, but with our system, it allows everybody to be on the same page, to be on the same portal.”
When Motsick began investing in the software company, he said he noticed it had virtually no marketing. It also operates with an enterprise resource planning system, a process he said can take a long time to build — another factor he suspects had contributed to its slow growth since its founding in 1997.
“They were just growing only off of word of mouth, so I knew that I could add a bit of my commercial experience into this company,” Motsick said.
Swivel hired a few additional staff members, including a chief technology officer and some software developers, bringing the total employee count to 20, he added.
After growing his previous firm, Catapult, from three to 150 employees, Motsick has taken his commercial experience and interest in the freight industry and applied it to his role at Swivel Software, he said.
“We’re just providing that capital injection to where we can scale the business for future years,” he said, adding that he plans to “create a global brand” by expanding in the U.S. and Europe. “We’re very active in scaling the technology. We’re adding more visibility into our current applications, and we’ll be hopefully growing.”
