We build the software that Baltic couriers actually wanted

Ieva Šimkutė was running regional planning for a parcel operator when she reached the limit of what a spreadsheet and three experienced dispatchers could do. Every peak season the same thing happened: volume outran the plan, first-attempt success collapsed, and the cost of the failures wiped out the margin on the good deliveries.

The routing tools on offer were built for Western European density and priced for it too. None of them understood a nine-storey apartment block with one working intercom, a rural leg where the next stop is fourteen kilometres away, or the fact that a Lithuanian address can be written five correct ways and none of them match your database.

Ieva and Mindaugas Petrauskas — who had been building optimisation systems for freight — decided the tool they needed did not exist, so they built it. The first version planned a single depot in Kaunas. It cut planned distance by fifteen percent in the first week, and the dispatchers stopped dreading November.

We did not set out to build a platform. We set out to fix one depot's Tuesday. The platform is what that turned into once other operators asked for the same thing.

Seven years on, Kelvara plans thousands of vehicles across Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and north-east Poland every morning. The founding belief has not changed: last-mile logistics in this region is a distinct problem, and it deserves software built for it rather than adapted to it.