April the 13th, 2022 - The Zagreb startup Optimoroute has been gaining some truly excellent results across the pond on the American market.

As Poslovni Dnevnik/Sergej Novosel Vuckovic writes, the recently held American-Croatian Forum in Zagreb raised questions from many domestic companies about what they can provide to Americans and Americans in business. The successful Zagreb startup Optimoroute was able to give them the answer and a hint at the direction in which they should go.

The Zagreb startup Optimoroute stated that Croatian enterprises should try to place an innovative product with expertise in its application and adaptation for different industries. The company run by the Saric brothers - Marin (Chief Executive Officer, CEO) and Frane (Chief Technical Officer, CTO), as co-owners (the third is their friend Goran Kukolj) has developed software, ie a platform for route optimisation and organisation and scheduling field work for the likes of deliverymen and drivers, which brings savings to companies.

With today's disrupted logistics-distribution-supply chains, any method that would reduce the consumption of both variables in the saying "time is money" is highly desirable, and this is best recognised by Americans, Optimoroute's most numerous customers, of which they have more than 2,500 worldwide.

"Our biggest market is America and it has the strongest growth (70 percent of all our revenue), and we have very good results in Europe, Australia and New Zealand. Our sales team routinely deals in foreign markets without talking to them live or on the phone. How much we've grown is best shown by the fact that this year alone we sent several million SMS messages through which we informed our customers about the details of their deliveries or the arrival of their service technicians,'' the Zagreb startup Optimoroute's founders explained. There are also small florists and factories, distributors, and also sector leaders among their clients:

“Our client and fresh food supplier is Hardie’s whose 160 trucks make thousands of deliveries a day across the state of Texas. With the OptimoRoute platform, they reduced the distance travelled by 20 percent and increased their delivery capacity by 16 percent. The planning process has been accelerated 8 times, and now one person is doing what a team of people used to do,'' say the Saric brothers. Just how efficient and adaptable their innovative platform is for all SUVs is illustrated by yet another example:

"When a severe snowstorm hit the northeastern United States recently, some 16 million Americans were affected. The services involved in snow removal used our platform with which they could act in the field much faster. Given that with our software, one person does more work in half a day than a team of 8 logisticians would do in a month, it isn't surprising that we've reached a lot of clients,'' explained the men behind the Zagreb startup Optimoroute.

"We're currently in talks and we hope that some of those talks will result in some new customers as they're aware of the importance of modernising their logistics to become more competitive in the global market," said Frane and Marin Saric. An important piece of news for their business, aside from the fact that they have doubled their number of employees to 40 since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic and that they have grown significantly when it comes to revenue, they also believe that they have attracted top managers. Although their entire engineering process is right here in Croatia, Optimoroute is, as they say, an international company that employs experts from the USA, as well as from the rest of Europe in France, Germany and the United Kingdom.

"As energy prices continue to rise, companies are becoming more sensitive to fuel consumption, which is another reason why our platform is so useful to them," concluded Frane and Marin Saric from the Zagreb startup Optimoroute.

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July the 17th, 2021 - The Croatian OptimoRoute software is gaining traction and attention, and with it some big ambitions indeed.

As Novac writes, the Croatian OptimoRoute software is a piece of route optimisation software already used by several thousand companies and is developing very strongly. The American investment fund Prelude Ventures invested a massive 6.5 million US dollars in the company last year, estimating that OptimoRoute has a great chance of conquering the global market.

"Our investors believe that we can, with a little luck, reach a value of one hundred million dollars, and they think we're not far from a billion dollars. We'd rather try something big and ambitious and see where that takes us, than play it safe in the European way,'' said Marin Saric, the co-founder and CEO of OptimoRoute, during an appearance on the show Entrepreneurial Mindset.

Croatian OptimoRoute software experienced rapid growth of one hundred percent during the coronavirus pandemic. In addition to food delivery companies and stores that receive goods from central warehouses, route optimisation is now needed by companies from thousands of different industries, including floriculture, house cleaning and yard maintenance.

"The whole world is changing! Route optimisation, which used to be interesting only to "geeks", has turned into a global mega trend. We rode that wave early enough and now we are trying to surf on it and see how far it will take us,'' said Saric.

"We want to be globally present. We want to gather the strongest engineers we can reach here in Croatia, and beyond if necessary, in order to bring them to Zagreb and create a new generation product. Not only do we want to create the best software, but we want it to be office software which is available to everyone at a very low cost. Bill Gates wanted to see a PC on every desk, and we want to see our software for organising a mobile workforce in every small company,'' revealed Saric.

Although the Croatian OptimoRoute software primarily targets small businesses, it is also used very successfully by large ones. Among their biggest clients at the moment is one pipeline passing through five states of the United States of America.

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