Founded in June 2018, Paris-based SpaceFill has already enabled more than 100 European companies to find, book and manage temporary storage facilities in 1,500 warehouses throughout France. Just five months after launching, the startup has raised €1 million from the German fund La Famiglia alongside business angels including Xavier Niel and Michael Benabou.
It was while working in the warehouse of his family business that Maxime Huzar, founder and CEO of SpaceFill, realised that 20% of storage space remained unused throughout the year.
“This is a very common situation at the national level, where of the 78 million square meters of warehousing space, nearly 20 million square feet are available at any given moment,” said Huzar.
Logistics providers who operate the warehouses often don’t have the means to promote their unused space outside their region, but knowing where storage space is available in real time makes it possible to imagine a logistics chain that is smarter, more flexible and more adapted to its activity.
SpaceFill makes it possible to activate or deactivate one or more outsourced storage spaces directly online via its platform, to remotely control them, and to integrate them with existing software tools. This access to a scalable storage infrastructure allows SpaceFill customers to temporarily store their goods, respond to emergencies, better distribute their inventory geographically, reduce the time and cost of shipping their goods, or expand their business without long-term commitment.
“In the current context of international competition and trade acceleration, it is increasingly necessary to temporarily access storage spaces to be able to scale more easily and quickly,” added Huzar. “SpaceFill aims to benefit companies with goods to store, offering advantages including accessibility of information, responsiveness of online tools, trade security and simple interconnections of information systems and transparency of billing.”
