The Hidden Data Powering Global Logistics – Simon Vandemoortele, CEO of GeoPostCodes

Ever wondered how global logistics companies keep track of millions of postal codes, city divisions, and ports worldwide? In this episode of Everything is Logistics, we sit down with Simon Vandemoortele, CEO of GeoPostCodes, to discuss how structured, AI-powered location data is revolutionizing freight, sustainability tracking, and supply chain efficiency. 

🔹 How GeoPostCodes maintains the most comprehensive location data set in the world 

🔹 Why U.S. companies struggle with international postal systems 

🔹 The massive role location data plays in carbon emissions tracking 

🔹 How DB Schenker, MSC, and other global giants use GeoPostCodes for freight planning

LINKS:

• GEOPostCodes' Website
• Manifest Takeaways

WATCH THE FULL EPISODE HERE

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Chapters

• 2:07 The Story Behind GEOPostCodes
• 4:52 What Makes Location Data So Complex?
• 8:27 Real-World Use Cases in Logistics
• 12:07 Challenges of Mapping the World
• 16:22 New Innovations in Location Data
• 18:27 Why This Matters for the Future of Supply Chain

Transcript

Blythe Brumleve: 0:37

Blythe, welcome into another episode of everything is logistics, a podcast for the thinkers in freight. I'm your host, Blythe Milligan, and we are proudly sponsored by SPI logistics. And on this episode, we have another fantastic conversation for you today at manifest, the future of supply chain and logistics. We have GEOPostCodes, which is new to me. It's obviously not new, because they're a global company. But Simon, welcome into the show. Please tell tell the audience a little bit about yourself and the company.

Simon Vandeemortele: 1:11

Thank you, Blythe, great to be here. So GEOPostCodes is a location data provider. We've been we just celebrated our 15th anniversary last year, and we really, you want me to start by myself or, yeah, please. How did you get into the this business? Yeah, so I'm an engineer by training. So I got into business. I started my career in software engineering, and then I moved to IT consulting with Accenture, but I always wanted to basically grow a tech company. And so I did a couple of years at a CTO at a Belgian tech company in big data analytics. And then it was time for me to basically find my own tech company. And I was looking for something that already existed, but I had potential to grow, and I was GEOPostCodes, right? And so I started. I met the founder of GEOPostCodes code in 2019 and then we immediately hit it off. I mean, it was very clear that he was kind of the genius creator, and I was more like the scale guy and so and I basically bought the company from him in 2020 middle of COVID. Oh, wow. And yeah, that was interesting. Try to do, try to do the leverage buyout in the middle of a global financial crisis. It's always a fun moment to do that, challenging. But what was interesting is, I think we're not the only one in logistics. We were doing really well in COVID. Our sales were going really well because everybody was focusing a lot of companies actually got a lot done during COVID, and we were one of those, right? And so, yeah, so I've been the CEO for five years now. Been growing quite fast. We're lucky to have a very broad customer base, mostly fortune, 500 companies, 60% in the US, and a lot of them have been with us for a decade. So it's really cool,

Blythe Brumleve: 2:51

and from like a high level perspective, what does GEOPostCodes provide?

Unknown: 2:56

So GEOPostCodes, we really bring location data to most of your use cases. And I'll try to summarize the product. You have to imagine that we have every single country on the planet. We have every single administrative division, and that's actually quite complicated. I mean, us doesn't always realize that, but the world is extremely diverse. We have every single city, every single neighborhood for 80 countries. We have the streets, and we have all of that in one centralized, normalized format, everything geo located, everything translated, and we have the shapes of everything. So we have the shapes of every postal code, every administrative division on the planet. So that sounds It's a mouthful. It's a simple product, innocent, but it's extremely powerful, and it takes a lot of data to produce that and keep it up to date, right? To give you an idea, we we source about 1500 data sources, which means we have about 1500 data pipelines that are running at any point in time, and we produce about three updates per week. And so that's really what our customers are getting with us, right? They're getting kind of a map of the world, and it fits on a lot of use cases. And we can go into use cases if you want. So you want. And so that's basically what we do. So we're very much a geospatial company and a data company, so people, most of our, you know, our team, is really like GIS nerds, spending their time in front of a map all day long, and using, like AI. It was, it was called machine learning. Before it was called AI, we've been using machine learning for decades to basically build the data sets and improve the quality now,

Blythe Brumleve: 4:23

very like fifth grade level question, what is, why not GPS? Or what is the difference, maybe, between GEOPostCodes and like a GPS location or question,

Unknown: 4:34

longitude? Yeah, location intelligence a very broad is a very broad market. There's players like that, like here, who's here, you know? And there's many different use cases, right? We can talk, I mean, logistically. Talk a lot about tracking and GPS. So it's very much about knowing, Okay, where is my asset, right? Where is my container? Where is my track? Very important. We're not actually in that space. We're in the space where, where is where? Meaning, look at my city. I come from Brussels. So where is Brussels? Oh, it's in Belgium. Where? Exactly, what region? How is it spelled? Brussels is the English name. Actually, it also has a French name. My country has two languages, so it has a Dutch name as well. So are you going to recognize the city name if I say Bruxelles or Brussel? So being able to have a clear map of the world before you start tracking GPS coordinates, you get lat longitude, okay, you know, but usually, a lot of our customers, for example, they use us for geofencing. They have the latitude and longitude of their truck, but they'd like to know what postal area is it, what city is it in? And that translation requires. Is an actual correct map of the world. And it sounds simple, if you do it just for us, because you live in one of the countries where you have, like, the highest data quality on the planet. And there's a couple of, it's about 10 to 15 countries, you know, with the old name, like Canada or Australia or UK. What about the 235 other countries on the planet where you don't have that, where you if you were operating in Baltimore, you would like to know, okay, my truck and what region is it and what province is it? So that's why you need us to translate. We do have latitude and longitude, but our data is fixed, right? It's, it's a latitude and longitude of Las Vegas. It's the shape of Las Vegas. It's the postal code of Las Vegas. So that's what we provide. And you need both to actually make sense of the data. And so

Blythe Brumleve: 6:20

are you sourcing it? You mentioned, you know, 1000s of different data sources that you're working with. What about some of the other you know, I read in one of your press releases that there's challenging countries such as China, Brazil, Russia and the United Kingdom. What makes these countries challenging to find that data source?

Unknown: 6:36

Yep, so just maybe to start with the data sources, you have to imagine that every postal operator on the planet is one of the data source. Data Sources, every National Geographic Institute, a lot of the landmark institutes. So we really go very deep looking for sources. A lot of them are public, but need a lot of work to be usable. And we double check even with text of law, right? When Australia merged 10 administrative divisions into one, this is something that's always happening somewhere on the planet. Yeah, we get our sources tell us, Oh, something's changed, and then we double check. We actually go to the text of law. So you just make sure that we understand this change well, because once we deploy to our customers, that's one of the values we bring, right? Really, like the checking, the double checking. So to your point, yes, a lot of our customers have trouble finding right data for because they find data for easy countries like the US, and then they go to more complex countries. Okay, we can't find good sources of data. So we really are constantly we have a team that's constantly doing data watch. It's constantly monitoring new sources, all of the public sources, a lot of inferred sources. So yeah, we've constantly been renewing this for 15 years. So we also have one thing that people don't know is public data also disappears, meaning the government might be publishing it, and then one day out of the blue, six months later, the data is gone. And so it's public, but it's not available anymore. We have 15 years of built up data, so it also allows us to really triangulate some missing points of the data and really enrich it. Typically, you need five data sources for a country, if you have a, again, an easy country that us, you maybe would one or two. You might be might have enough. But even a country like Portugal, we were having to match a good data source for demographic, for, I'm sorry, for urban and another one for rural areas, and we need to mix both to get right, good quality data,

Blythe Brumleve: 8:22

because a lot of especially in South America, you know, just just road construction in general, is rapidly evolving. Yes, so

Unknown: 8:28

that's a good point. So the data changes faster than people think. A lot of countries have also micro postal code system, like Canada, UK, Netherlands, Israel, yeah. So they have a postal code that's the size of a street or street corner. So that has two consequences. First of all, there's not 1000s of them, there's millions of them, and they change not every couple of months, but every couple of weeks. Wow, right? So there, your update rate is much faster.

Blythe Brumleve: 8:53

So what are some of the use cases for a lot of your customers? Once they buy this data set, it's consistently updated. They just plug it into, maybe an API connection, into their tech stack. That's a

Unknown: 9:03

good question. So they plug it in, into the tech stack. So one of the things we do is we bring the expertise with the data, right? So you work with us, you will get top experts that will deploy that with you, because it's not always easy, and we're specialists in those use cases. So we've done them multiple times. Some of our customers, it's the first time they do it. So that assistance is important, because we kind of know the roadblocks, and you know the how you set us up for success. Then you look at use cases, we have, I would say, a bit, three families of customers. We have data partnerships, like people, like locate our partners with us. We provide the data they use in some of the API calls. We have product builders, people that build products on top of our data, and then we have people that use it internally, right? So those all, it all fits into the infrastructure. And so use case, one product use case would be carbon care. So carbon care pin joins us as a customer last year, and they do, as you can imagine, a carbon computation, which is a big topic in logistics. And yeah, for them to do that accurately, they actually need to measure the distances correctly. And there's some countries where they couldn't source the data right. So I think we work with them on Turkey, maybe China, and so being sure, like, what are this? Now, it's getting a bit technical, but the lat long of the center of the postal code. That's typically how you work with carbon emissions. You just want an approximate distance, as the corona flies. For many use cases, you just want to see what's the distance between that postal area and that postal area. So that's one use case, another use case. One of our big customers is dB Shanker was a big sponsor last year, and. Do a couple of things with us. They do visualization. So when they're showing their delivery areas to their own teams and their customers, actually putting that on a map, and having all the postal areas clearly marked, or all the administrative divisions clearly marked, makes it much easier to communicate to their customers. They also do postal code validation, and I mean, we have some testimonials on our website. This is 300 times faster doing it with us than basically having a clutch of solutions that are taped together. And that's not audited, because our data is constantly audited, constantly verified, so they get much better quality than if they do this in house. So

Blythe Brumleve: 11:11

it's not as simple as just, you know, buying a data set and integrating into your, you know, software provider, and then you can kind of wipe your hands,

Unknown: 11:17

no, no. You typically have to understand what you're doing. And use cases are, there are some hidden complexities in use cases that our customers always think about. For example, is we work with MSC. MS is also one of our large customers. They were designing their terminal interfaces to ship containers from point A to point B, but it's worldwide, right? And so say they're quite advanced, because in the terminal they have the two languages. They will say, OK, I will have the language. I will have the English version of the addresses, but I will also have the local version. Maybe it's in Greek. Maybe the terminal operator is in Greece, and they're speaking Greek to the customer, and you have the Greek alphabet there, but the person who's going to receive the order also needs to be able to read they might not read Greek alphabet, so they might want the English version next to it. That's one of the things we do. We do the translation I gave you. The example of my city, Brussels. You will get Brussels in the local language and in English for internalization purposes. So it's one of the things we provide and telling our customers up front. Have you thought about the language issue? How are you looking at this? Are you going to manage your interfaces? Your Chinese colleagues might not, might want to see the address in Chinese. So how are you going to do this? We have all the data to do it, but you need to provide in your solution. Need to build it into it.

Blythe Brumleve: 12:27

So you had mentioned earlier that 60% of your customers are US based. I'm just curious if there's any sort of location information that's unique to the United States versus the rest of the world? Yes, there is.

Unknown: 12:40

So one of the things USPS does is, when a city, when a postal code has several cities or several localities, they designate a primary one. Just okay, there's many localities that switches postal code, but we USPS formally decide this is the core one. That's a concept that does not exist in the rest of the world. And we know this because when we worked on, I think again, so Expeditors is one of our customers, and expediters has worked with us on that. They said, oh, we need this for the rest of the world. And we said, yeah, it doesn't exist. So yeah, but we need it anyway. And this is a good example of the complexities, because our TMS system requires it. The field is mandatory. It was in one box. Okay, this is a good example of how we collaborate with customers. Okay, we will find a solution for you. We have the technology and the knowledge to run the heuristics worldwide to basically find a primary city worldwide. It's not a formal concept, but we can use heuristics to approximate the primary city for every postal code. And that's something we developed, I think, five years ago with them, and it's now part of our standard product. So it's so it's funny that we have primary cities, which is a US concept exported to the rest of the world, because it's a useful concept. Wow,

Blythe Brumleve: 13:52

that's it. So maybe we are doing a couple things, right? Yeah, absolutely.

Unknown: 13:56

Again. I mean, us has fantastic data. So it's a world run country.

Blythe Brumleve: 14:01

So what are some other maybe important things that you think are important to mention that we haven't already talked about with GEOPostCodes?

Unknown: 14:09

I think two things, maybe is first to understand. Well, three things, let's play this one. Couple of things why you should consider working with us. First, location data, as I described it, just having a correct understanding of the world. It's an extremely complex problems, and when I'm in the logistics sector, I usually don't need to explain that, because people know they feel the pain, but just don't do it yourself. Right? If you're doing a couple of countries, that's fine, but as soon as you go more than 15 countries, you probably want to work with a player like us, right? You don't want to do all this in houses. It's too complicated. It's one thing. The other thing would be, we really specialize in logistics, in the sense that we have been building for over five years, actually six years now, a logistic specific data set. So we have a data set that is more plug and play, as you say, because it solves all the things. I don't want to go too much in detail, because you can get technical. It'll give you an idea. Other freight, ocean freight, or railroad will know unload codes, which is a public data set. It's very much used in freight work. But actually, unfortunately, the public source is actually not a very high quality. So we have actually an enhanced version where all the problems are solved. It also connects to the postal code so you want to do intermodal transport, so fixed, so the whole package of data sets that you need to do, correct addressing, correct shipping, whether it's for what you call it terrorist, for your whether you want to do your rate. Cards, or you want to just correctly do intermodal, or do you want to do carbon compensation? We have all of that basically out of the box and ready to integrate with your system, and we have a team that's done it many times.

Blythe Brumleve: 15:48

Wow. So what is the scope of your team? It sounds like it's massive. Oh, no,

Unknown: 15:51

we just, I think this year we're hiring recruiting a lot right now, I guess we must be around 35 now. 35 people?

Blythe Brumleve: 15:58

Yeah, that's all of them are managing all of this information, yeah.

Unknown: 16:02

So we have, but a big part of our team is we have a very small commercial team. Actually, most of our team is actually, like I said, products and customer facing, because we have a lot of big customers, and we work on complex cases. Well, that's amazing.

Blythe Brumleve: 16:18

So you are also last question, or last couple questions I have here making a big announcement at manifest. I believe maybe the press release dropped today. Can you share some of that?

Unknown: 16:27

Yeah, so it is about the logistic Data Suite. One element we added this year is port terminals. So to complement your no code, and again, I'm sorry, I'm going technical there. It's unlo codes are only that granular because they tell you, for example, Brussels is a good example as well. So it has one unlo codes for the ports, the railroads, the truck and terminal and airports, which is a bit laughable for people living in Brussels, because those are completely unrelated places have nothing to do with each other, but just one unlock codes. So it shows that you actually do need to go one level more granular. And when it comes to ports, we've actually released, again, an enhanced data set that gives you much more structured, normalized information about the capabilities of each port, which is important because you, when you're planning, basically you're shipping. You want to know what terminal has the capabilities I need. Is this a cold terminal? Is this a deep terminal? Can I shift that kind of shift towards, you know, what kind of k is this? And so we have all that information, again, normalized, just to take that work away from people like MSC or freight forwarders that need that data anyway. And otherwise, I have in house teams trying to build that data and clean it themselves. It's just IT skills much better if you do it with us. Absolutely.

Blythe Brumleve: 17:36

It sounds like a massive problem that they would have to undertake. And so why not just go to the other

Unknown: 17:40

sexy problem? By the way, it's a boring problem, but we have people working on that every day, so so you don't, so our customers don't have to. But

Blythe Brumleve: 17:46

that's what I love about this industry's supply chain, global logistics, is that it's, it's one of those things. Every time you peel back a layer on the onion, there's so many more layers exactly that are there to discover. And this was a, this was a conversation that was something that I had no idea about, and now I have, hopefully the audience will find it, you know, as valuable as well. Because this sounds like something that you know, every tech provider in United States, logistics companies, you know, needs and maybe global as well.

Unknown: 18:11

Yeah, everybody's going abroad, probably should think about this.

Blythe Brumleve: 18:14

Yes, absolutely. Well, where can folks get in touch with you? Get in touch with GEOPostCodes.

Unknown: 18:18

Yeah, just our website is GEOPostCodes.com we're easy to find. You can reach out, you know, either to me, I don't know if there's any details gonna be shared, or directly to our teams, and we'd be very happy to help you and just also meet you and hear, you know, if you don't want to work with us today, it's fine that maybe couple of years down the road, it's great to meet people in logistics industry. Thank you so much. Blythe,

Blythe Brumleve: 18:45

I hope you enjoyed this episode of everything is logistics, a podcast for the thinkers in freight, telling the stories behind how your favorite stuff and people get from point A to B. Subscribe to the show. Sign up for our newsletter and follow our socials over at everything is logistics.com and in addition to the podcast, I also wanted to let you all know about another company I operate, and that's digital dispatch, where we help you build a better website. Now, a lot of the times, we hand this task of building a new website or refreshing a current one off to a co worker's child, a neighbor down the street or a stranger around the world, where you probably spend more time explaining the freight industry than it takes to actually build the dang website. Well, that doesn't happen at Digital dispatch. We've been building online since 2009 but we're also early adopters of AI automation and other website tactics that help your company to be a central place to pull in all of your social media posts, recruit new employees and give potential customers a glimpse into how you operate your business. Our new website builds start as low as$1,500 along with ongoing website management, maintenance and updates starting at $90 a month, plus some bonus freight, marketing and sales content similar to what you hear on the podcast. You can watch a quick explainer video over on digital dispatch.io, just check out the pricing page once you arrive, and you can see how we can build your digital ecosystem on a strong foundation. Until then, I hope you enjoyed this episode. I'll see you all real soon and go Jags you.