Jarell Habets

Founder & CEO Shypple

Last Reviewed: September 27, 2026

Executive Summary

Jarell Habets is the founder and chief executive of Shypple, a Rotterdam-based digital freight forwarder that lets shippers book, track and manage ocean, air and rail freight through its own platform. He started the company in 2016 after an internship at a freight forwarder showed him how manual and fragmented the business was, and has since taken it from a Noord-Brabant startup to a company with more than 130 employees and offices in nine countries. The defining move of his tenure so far was the 2021 acquisition of Milestone, a long-established perishables forwarder, which combined a technology-led startup with a traditional logistics operation and was financed alongside two Series A rounds totalling EUR 25.5 million.

Career Highlights

• Founded Shypple in 2016 in his home region of Noord-Brabant and moved its headquarters to Rotterdam, Europe’s largest port, in 2017.
• Raised EUR 1.7 million in 2018 from BOM, August Ventures and private investors.
• Raised EUR 7 million in April 2021 and EUR 18.5 million in August 2021 from investors including Dutch Founders Fund, Newtown Partners, InnovationQuarter and BOM Brabant Ventures.
• Led the acquisition of Milestone Logistics and Milestone Fresh in 2021, making Shypple a digital forwarder for perishables; the Milestone brands were renamed Shypple Fresh and Shypple Logistics in late 2024.
• Shypple was named Startup of the Year in 2019 and won a Tech5 award in October 2021.

Professional Journey

Habets was born and raised in Dongen, in the Dutch province of Noord-Brabant. While studying in Rotterdam he worked at a freight forwarder as an intern, and what he saw there became the basis of his company: shipping involved many steps, many parties and a constant flow of paperwork, with customers often facing opaque costs and little visibility into where their freight was. He conceived a business-to-business platform on which customers could book shipments for their cargo directly.

He founded Shypple in 2016 in Noord-Brabant and a year later moved the headquarters to Rotterdam. In 2018 the company raised EUR 1.7 million from the Brabant development agency BOM, August Ventures and private investors, and in 2019 it was named Startup of the Year. In a 2022 interview he said he had badly underestimated the Covid-19 pandemic: with China shut down, Shypple’s revenue fell by 80 to 90 percent and the company came close to running out of cash.

2021 was the company’s step change. Shypple raised EUR 7 million in April and a further EUR 18.5 million in August, and used the second round alongside the acquisition of Milestone Logistics and Milestone Fresh, a forwarding group founded in 2004 with a specialism in perishables and joint ventures in Central America and China. Habets said at the time that the deal strengthened Shypple’s capabilities in perishables and air freight to a globally competitive position. The company opened an office in Antwerp in 2022 and launched per-shipment CO2e reporting for its customers.

In October 2024 Habets announced that Milestone Fresh would become Shypple Fresh from 1 November 2024, with Milestone Logistics following as Shypple Logistics on 1 December, explaining that the Milestone name had been kept for the first years because of its reputation in fresh produce. Shypple reports first customers in Colombia and Germany in 2024 and expanded its offices in China and Hong Kong in 2025. He leads the company alongside a chief financial officer, a chief commercial officer and a chief product officer.

Education

He studied in Rotterdam, but no source reviewed names the institution or the qualification.