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Shipping-tech player Ovrsea bets on Miami to lead its US expansion

Nancy Dahlberg
Nancy Dahlberg
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By Nancy Dahlberg

Amid a wave of European companies choosing to locate their US or North American headquarters in Miami, Ovrsea, a French freight-forwarding software company, is one of the latest to drop anchor and build a base in the Magic City.

Actually, David Grinevald, Managing Director USA for Ovrsea, moved to Miami a year ago. When Ovrsea’s founders asked him to head up the US expansion, which was already underway in New York City, Grinevald knew Miami well as a Florida International University alumnus a decade ago. He had been visiting often since that time, and was aware of the tech movement taking place. “I told the founders ‘I think there is a real play and there is a real bet to be made in Miami. And so they said yes, you can go to Miami and try to open a small regional office over there.”

He hired two sales people and after four months the Miami office, in Edgewater, had more commercial traction than the larger NYC office. “Now we have 15 people there and we have three people in New York, and 100% of our future hires will be here,” said Grinevald.

Miami, a leading trade and logistics hub for the Americas, is now Ovrsea’s US headquarters.

David Grinevald, Managing Director USA for Ovrsea. At top of post, Ovrsea’s Miami team.

Grinevald had helped run a startup in France for about six years before joining Ovrsea about three years ago, knowing little then about the international freight and logistics industry. “It’s a fascinating industry for me specifically because I studied international relations and economics. International logistics is a great proxy to understand where the global economy is going activated.”

What does the Ovrsea platform do? “I always say we do a very old job in a very modern way. The very old job is the job of a freight forwarder,” which can involve interactions with some 15 different players, he explains. “No shipper wants to talk to 15 different companies, you want to talk to one company who’s going to organize and coordinate the actions of those 15 players, and this is what we do. We built technology which makes the process from start to finish seamless, and it’s honestly a very pleasant product to sell to our clients because it’s life changing for those operators.”

Asking for and receiving quotes within two hours, easily sharing documents, tracking cargo in real time — “our technology allows clients to manage everything without ever sending a single email.”

Since its founding in 2017, Ovrsea’s business has been at least doubling every year, Grinevald says. With offices in France, Spain, Italy and the US, Ovrsea serves over 1,000 clients and handles 10,000 to 15,000 containers a year shipping to and from over 80 countries.

Miami of course is an attractive market because it’s a trade hub and a gateway to Latin America, a region where Ovrsea wants to expand services. With the US being the second largest freight forwarding market in the world after China, Grinevald said the company could also be looking at opening an LA office for Trans Pacific transport in 2025.

In Miami, Ovrsea is currently hiring in sales and operations, he said. “We are very open to hiring people who have no experience in the logistics industry. It’s a little bit like when you’re learning to play the piano. If you learn the wrong way, it’s very hard to make you relearn the right way.”

Ovrsea is one of a number of European companies that have expanded to Miami in recent years, including Hiberus, from Spain, a software maker and consultancy strong in media, travel, retail and banking that planted its Americas HQ in Coral Gables, Paysend, the cross-border payment platform from the United Kingdom; carbon credit marketplace ClimateTrade relocating here from Spain, and Factorial, the Spanish HR-tech unicorn that now employs more than 40 people in Miami. 

Ovrsea is also one of some 170 French startups and larger companies, such as Hugging Face and Teleperformance, with offices in South Florida, said Stan Coignard, He should know, he has presided over the French Tech Miami Chapter for a few years now. Many of these companies are in the AI or robotics space, but other big verticals are cleantech and healthtech, said Stan, an tech entrepreneur himself who arrived in Miami in 2017.

French Tech, which serves 150 communities worldwide, is on a mission to promote French engineering and help the country’s startups and larger companies in each of its communities attract talent and capital by connecting them to one another and to the right resources. French Tech also organizes an annual event called French Tech Capital Days. For the next one in Miami, next April, Coignard expects about 30 French fund-raising startups to participate in the two-day event.

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