Plenty of startups have worked to address the challenges that come with last-mile logistics. But Jack Maddalena, CEO and co-founder of United Kingdom-based Naurt, has a different issue in mind: the last 100 meters.
Naurt’s technology enables delivery drivers to pinpoint exactly where the best entrance for the address they’re headed to—and helps identify ideal parking locations.
“We believe this is the last piece of the puzzle when it comes to the supply chain that hasn’t really been looked at—the last 100 meters, not the last mile,” he said. “Everyone has worked on navigation routing, and there’s no more meat on the bone when it comes to that, but the last 100 meters has been looked over quite heavily.”
The company announced Tuesday it had expanded its UK business into the United States, adding 155 million addresses to its system. In California, it has put over 11 million addresses on the map; in New York, it has added 6.6 million addresses to its system. In Florida alone, 13.8 million addresses are now included Naurt’s data.
Maddalena said the depth and breadth of the U.S. market, both on the consumer side and on the delivery company front, made it desirable to push Naurt into the U.S.
“In America, you have delivery companies within a state, or in a few states or nationwide. There’s so much more demand for solutions like this, and that’s why we’ve made the strategic step of [selecting] the U.S. to be our next battleground…because we want to be where the most delivery companies are,” he said.
Jack Maddalena, CEO and co-founder, Naurt
And the company’s entry comes just as delivery companies face their busiest time of the year: holiday season.
“We’re going into busy season, so a lot of delivery companies are having huge strain through deliveries. That causes a lot of error, failed deliveries [and] second attempt deliveries. This is very costly,” he said, noting that he hopes companies facing difficulties with deliveries will consider adopting Naurt as they finalize their 2025 budgets and technology priorities.
But the expansion into the U.S. isn’t the only project the Naurt team has been entrenched in; in the first quarter of 2025, Maddalena said he and the team plan to launch Naurt in the rest of Europe and in Canada.
When a driver uses Naurt’s technology, the system shows them where the ideal parking location is—and where the best entry point on the building is. For a standard house in the suburbs, that could be the front door; for more complex buildings, like apartments and offices, the optimal entrypoint might be a side door.
Image courtesy of Naurt
Having that information helps drivers save time—even if just one minute on each delivery—along their routes, enabling better efficiency and, in some cases, the ability to deliver additional packages during a driver’s shift.
In addition to the information the driver receives, they can also see an accuracy rating—low, medium or high—indicating how sure Naurt is that what it has suggested is the most ideal entrance and parking area for the address in question.
Though Maddalena is hesitant to call Naurt “an AI company,” as so many startups entering today’s market seem apt to do, much of the technology underlying Naurt is powered by machine learning. Its system doubly validates that Naurt has the correct information for a variety of addresses and uses a language model to standardize address formats.
“Everyone all around the world does addresses differently…so we have a language model to manage that, to ensure that we’re matching the correct information to that address when somebody’s requesting it,” he explained.
While much of the benefit reaped from Naurt impacts companies directly, consumers are also likely to have more positive experiences with deliveries because of the technology.
In the U.S., six in 10 consumers indicated that they’re worried about package theft during the holiday season, data from Harris Poll and logistics location company Position Imaging shows. That same survey showed that 63 percent of Americans said they’d do more online shopping if they had more secure delivery options.
Maddalena said Naurt can help solve issues with lost deliveries and porch piracy; its mapping services can help companies better estimate delivery times—so rather than being presented with a three-hour estimated delivery window, consumers have more precise information.
“One of the big reasons why porch pirates are a thing is because parcels are left out for a long period of time. From a customer standpoint, if you know your goods are going to arrive at 12:42, you can ensure that yourself or a neighbor will be in to pick up those goods, to ensure they don’t get stolen,” he said.
Because Naurt’s specialty is making sure that packages make it to the correct spot, its technology can also mitigate instances of packages being left out in the open unnecessarily, in turn, making it more difficult for porch pirates to snatch goods up.
To further help both logistics companies and customers, Maddalena and his team are looking to further refine their data, particularly for office parks, college campuses and other multi-building areas. He also plans to provide further time metrics on how long it might take to complete a delivery.
Most of all, Maddalena said, he wants to continue to create technology that empowers delivery drivers, no matter what—or to where—they’re delivering.
“Naurt is kind of like what Uber did to London black cabs…Uber came along and allowed a driver at any skill level to be an expert like a black cab driver, and that’s what Naurt is to delivery drivers. We want to provide them with the knowledge to be an expert on every route around the world,” Maddalena told Sourcing Journal.
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