Alrik plans to cut emissions in Europe’s construction logistics
Alrik, a logistics software provider operating in Sweden, is on a mission to digitalise and decarbonise construction logistics, reducing fleet emissions by at least 10%.
The group has just raised €1 million in seed-funding from Pi Labs, a global venture capital firm, to finance its expansion into new European markets.
“Innovation plays a role in tackling emissions at every touch point in the global construction lifecycle, and the logistics supply chain and transportation of construction materials has been hugely overlooked until now,” said Faisal Butt, founder and managing partner, Pi Labs. “We see the global potential for an efficient, unified system to tackle fleet-wide transportation emissions.”
Alrik is tackling a global sustainability and productivity problem for material distributors to the construction sector, as transportation currently contributes 22% of the whole industry’s carbon footprint.
Despite the heavy reliance on logistics and transportation of materials to and from sites across the globe, processes and fleet management systems have remained largely analogue, manual and inefficient.
Monitoring emissions from point-to-point transportation enables developers and contractors to accurately measure emissions targets, while digitalising the logistic network significantly reduces project delay, delivery lead times and cost.
Alrik works directly with distributors to monitor and optimise emissions from construction deliveries through a single, unified platform; early users have reported reduced fleet emissions of up to 10%, with one customer seeing a 36% reduction in fleet cost after six months of use.
“Construction sites across Europe continue to grapple with uncertain lead times for materials from a countless number of suppliers and distributors, which hinders their progress,” said Nici Sundén-Cullberg, founder and CEO, Alrik. “The distributors also need to manage their own logistics network, with a bulk of this still being done over manual phone calls, hand-written records and whiteboards. The lack of coordination leads to poor supply chain visibility, expensive fleet operations and stalled projects on the client side.”
Alrik effectively eliminates manual coordination with, in many cases, 100 different suppliers and distributors, he said, and it unifies the entire supply chain network to deliver projects more efficiently.
Alrik already has over 100 customers, including many of Europe’s largest distributors, such as global building materials giant Saint-Gobain, northern European market leaders STARK Group, Kesko, Bygma, Mestergruppen as well as Swedish trade companies Karl Hedin and Woody.
The Stockholm-based company was launched in 2023 by Sundén-Cullberg and Axel Enblad.
Sundén-Cullberg, a former Morgan Stanley investment banker, was previously the CEO of challenger bank Lendify, which was founded in 2014 and sold to Nordic digital bank Lunar in 2021 at a valuation of $143 million. Prior to co-founding Alrik, Enblad was the CEO of Nordic fintech firm Fakturino.
