ZIM Integrated Shipping Services Ltd., along with other investors, announced the initial closing of an $8 million financing round in Spinframe. ZIM led this investment as part of its strategy to invest in early-stage companies involved in the digitalization of supply chains who offer novel cutting-edge services with high growth potential.
Spinframe develops vehicle-inspection systems based on artificial intelligence (AI), computer vision, and machine-learning technologies, that create "Digital Twins" for vehicles throughout the supply chain and detect anomalies from the assembly line throughout the vehicle journey to the dealership and end customer.
Spinframe's innovative system exhaustively documents vehicles and uses AI to quickly identify defects and external damage. The platform is capable of overseeing a large number of vehicles without human intervention in various locations, such as seaports, transportation and logistics hubs, parking lots, agencies, rental branches, and service centers. The combination of advanced image processing, damage classification, and data cloud storage allows for immediate vehicle visualization and status sharing at any stage, via a unified interface.
Spinframe's monitoring platform has already been implemented at a wide range of customers within the automotive industry, including prominent automotive OEMs, such as Volkswagen, car rental companies and dealerships.
The investment funds will be utilized by Spinframe to develop new and unique capabilities of Spinframe's platform, as well as to deliver a robust pipeline to implement solutions with new customers globally. In particular, the company aims to expand its activities throughout the vehicle maritime transport segment. Recently, Spinframe won an Ashdod Port tender, which will now use its offering to monitor vehicle disembarkment at the port.
Eli Glickman, ZIM President & CEO, said: "After conducting successful PoCs, we have identified the immense potential of Spinframe's technology and its applicability to our industry. As part of our overall approach and strategy, we actively seek out and invest in promising young companies as growth engines. This investment represents another successful partnership with a startup that specializes in digital automation solutions for the benefit of our customers. We take pride in supporting and enabling promising companies to flourish and achieve their full potential."
Ori Dangur, Spinframe's CEO, said: "This past year, Spinframe has grown significantly, and we are happy to see customers' conviction in our technology. We believe that our unique all-encompassing solutions have the potential to significantly improve the automotive supply chain and through our collaboration with ZIM, our ability to execute our strategy has been greatly enhanced. We are confident that with our investors' trust and ZIM's cooperation, we will continue to grow and deliver on the potential our technology holds."