Xeneta appoints Tonia Luykxas as chief revenue officer

The ocean and air freight rate benchmarking and intelligence platform – Xeneta – has appointed Tonia Luykx as new chief revenue officer.

“Luykx, who has a track record for building and scaling SaaS and tech businesses including Sift, Google, Dropbox and Amazon, has now set her sights on global logistics in the position of chief revenue officer at Oslo-based Xeneta,” reads the release.

She said: “I have always worked in organisations that challenge the status quo, to drive more productivity, more efficiency and a better way of working.

“In terms of the potential to transform how ocean and air freight is bought and sold and how supply chain procurement divisions operate, we have only scratched the surface.”

The Xeneta platform calls upon more than 400 million crowdsourced data points to allow buyers and sellers of ocean and air freight to benchmark rates across the market in real time.

The industry has experienced the most turbulent times in living memory as the Covid-19 pandemic plunged global supply chains into chaos and more recently through drought in the Panama Canal and conflict in the Red Sea impacting the Suez Canal.

Luykx believes the industry needs a new way of working – and that data and machine learning hold the key.

She said: “Disruption and innovation is my passion. Back when I joined Google, Microsoft was the status quo on office productivity and when you mentioned ‘the cloud’, people looked up into the sky and wondered what you were talking about.

“I have always been attracted to best-in-class technology and that is true of Xeneta. There isn’t one other organisation that has the global data network of benchmarks and market insights anywhere else in the world, so it is market-leading with huge potential to grow.

“We have not even started to quantify the level of automation and operational efficiencies we can bring.”

Patrik Berglund, Xeneta CEO, believes Luykx will be pivotal in untapping the full revenue potential of the Xeneta platform.

He said: “At our stage, we want to continuously improve and professionalize our sales force, but also bring in someone who has been through the growth journey we are targeting for Xeneta. Tonia brings both the best-in-class sales knowledge of the large corporate tech environments and the experience of growing a SaaS scale-up.”

How will Luykx bring a new way of thinking to one of the world’s oldest industries?

She said: “Long-standing industries have history and legacy but that brings opportunities to transform. Customers have never had access to this level of data, so it’s not that they are doing it wrong, it is that technology is enabling a better way of working.

“It is our mission to bring transparency to an industry which is opaque due to archaic behaviors and processes. We have a bigger vision for these organisations which will enable CEOs and COOs to reset strategy and allow their buying and selling teams to operate much more effectively and efficiently.”