Shypple expands management team

Shypple is adding two new members to its management team with immediate effect. The digital forwarder has appointed Patrick Weissert as Chief Product Officer (CPO) and René van Rappard as Chief Financial Officer (CFO) of the organisation. With this, Shypple takes a new step in realising its international growth ambitions and its aspirations to innovate the traditional global trade market.

Weissert has been building and managing tech products and tech product teams since the late 1990s. He has worked at Vodafone, Nokia/HERE and German unicorn Adjust, among others, and has founded several start-ups, including German Autolabs. At Shypple, Weissert is responsible for further innovating and strategically deploying the technology and scaling up the team.

“When building an AI assistant device for drivers with German Autolabs, which we manufactured in Malaysia, shipped to Europe and US and sold through a variety of online and shop based retailers, I got a glimpse into the arcane processes and tools used in the freight forwarding industry,” said Weissert. “As one of the early movers in this space Shypple is uniquely positioned to build one of the leading digital freight platforms, helping our customers to transform their supply chains with state-of-the-art booking, visibility, communication and collaboration capabilities.”

Van Rappard previously worked at McKinsey, and at tech scale-ups Catawiki and OneFit/Urban Sports Club. At Shypple he leads the finance team and is responsible for identifying  new investors and acquisition targets. He is deliberately making a move to a large, traditional industry that is finally seeing a lot of technological innovation.

“The global supply chain has come under a lot of stress over the past two years. This has accelerated the rate of industry innovation and Shypple is one the leading companies driving this change,” said van Rappard. “Once new customers start using our digital platform and visibility features, they tend to show great loyalty and steadily increase the volumes that they ship with us. This also creates a great opportunity for synergetic M&A. By joining forces with traditional freight forwarders, we can quickly onboard their customers onto our platform and dramatically improve those customers‘ experience. Last year, Shypple made its first acquisition, and we now receive much inbound interest in potential new business combinations.”

“Attracting Patrick and René is a further validation of our status as a prominent technology scaleup,” said Jarell Habets, CEO and founder of Shypple. “We are thrilled to add these talents to the management team, accelerating our international growth and taking giant steps to innovate the traditional freight transportation market.”

The expansion of the management team with Weissert and Van Rappard follows several months after the addition of Vakis Rigas as Vice President of Marketing. Rigas previously built up Typeform’s Product Marketing department and was Global Product Lead at Google. He is responsible for the strategic growth and brand positioning of Shypple.