News last week that Amazon founder Jeff Bezos was one of the largest investors in a $15m fundraising by a freight forwarder grabbed more headlines than would normally be expected for the sector and size of investment.

Beacon, the digitally focused company set up in 2018 by former Uber executives, gushed that the funding would allow its expertise in technology to “disrupt the trillion-dollar freight forwarding market by vastly improving the experience for importers and exporters with a more transparent and smarter shipping ­product”.