Danish shipping company Maersk has acquired Huub, a Portuguese cloud-based logistics start-up, specialising in technology for B2C warehousing for the fashion industry.

This is Maersk’s third acquisition this year within ecommerce logistics and it comes through its venture activities with Maersk Growth.

“Huub is a great fit for Maersk, a curious team with inspiring founders,” said Vincent Clerc, executive vice president at Maersk. “With Huub, we are acquiring world class capabilities and talent that will allow us to greatly accelerate the development of our omni-channel offering. This will make it much easier for our customers to focus on their core business of producing and selling goods and swiftly bringing them to the end-consumers.”

Once Huub’s technology is embedded into Maersk’s existing technology, its customers will get fully integrated Maersk ecommerce logistics products with modern user-friendly customer and partner interfaces. Furthermore, Maersk customers will have a single source of truth for stock visibility.

“Since day one, Huub has had two main purposes: disruption and scale,” said Tiago Paiva, Huub CEO. “Disruption to have the capacity – and courage – to say that a multi-billion dollar industry needs a digital revolution and to envision and create a revolutionary supply chain platform and ecosystem. In addition, there is the scale that allows disruption to occur, feeding it with the volumes that can make a difference. For Huub, this joint path that now starts with Maersk represents both. Firstly, the validation of our disruptive vision and product. And, secondly, Maersk is the scale enabler that will allow our platform to serve amazing customers and lead the ecommerce logistics market.”

Maersk Growth, the corporate venture arm of Maersk, first engaged with Huub in May 2019 as it believes collaboration with start-ups is an important lever for innovation.

To strengthen its integrated logistics offering, Maersk set out two and a half years ago on an M&A journey, acquiring: Vandegrift, a custom broker; Performance Team, a warehousing and distribution specialist; and KGH, a customs services company. In August 2021, Maersk expanded its ecommerce footprint by announcing the acquisition of Visible MSC and its intention to acquire Europe B2C.