For many Southeast Asian merchants, selling overseas has never been a question of demand alone. A small brand in Vietnam, Indonesia or Thailand may find buyers on Amazon, eBay, Shopify or social platforms, but the harder problem begins after checkout: paperwork, duties, customs clearance, tracking gaps and freight rates designed for companies shipping far larger volumes.
Amilo is trying to turn that messy middle into a single operating layer. The Singapore-based third-party logistics provider has completed and integrated its fourth acquisition in four years, folding cross-border specialist SG Link into its regional network. SG Link now operates as ShipX and connects merchants in Southeast Asia to more than 220 destinations globally.
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The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. But the acquisition is less notable as a standalone transaction than as another marker of how Amilo is building: buying operators with specific capabilities, then moving them onto its own logistics and technology stack rather than running them as separate businesses.
A cross-border layer for regional sellers
Founded to serve Southeast Asian commerce, Amilo provides warehousing, fulfilment and delivery services through a proprietary platform covering marketplaces, order management, warehouse operations, transport, customs and delivery management. The company says it integrates with major marketplaces including Amazon, eBay and Shopify.
SG Link, now ShipX, adds a piece that many domestic fulfilment providers struggle to offer at depth: end-to-end international shipping for smaller exporters. The business has operated in Vietnam since 2020 and focuses on merchants that lack the shipment volumes needed to negotiate strong freight terms on their own.
By pooling demand, ShipX can help smaller sellers access better shipping economics, while handling customs documentation, duties and tracking through a more unified process. That matters in a region where many small and mid-sized businesses can find overseas customers online but still face old-fashioned logistics bottlenecks once goods leave the warehouse.
Cross-border commerce is also becoming more important as Southeast Asian sellers look beyond crowded domestic marketplaces. Platforms such as Shopee, Lazada and TikTok Shop have widened access to consumers, but exporting remains uneven. A merchant may be able to list products globally in minutes, yet still spend days dealing with tax codes, tariff changes, broker hand-offs and customer complaints when parcels disappear from view.
Amilo’s bet is that solving those problems requires more than a booking portal. It requires control over the operational rails behind it.
The acquisition playbook
The company describes its approach as a repeatable acquisition and integration model. Rather than buying logistics firms and leaving their systems intact, Amilo looks for businesses with something difficult to build from scratch: a customer base, a licence, a trade lane, a local network or a specialist capability. It then migrates them onto a single technology stack.
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Some acquired businesses needed a turnaround, while others needed a broader network to scale. The common thread, according to Amilo, is that they eventually operate on the same infrastructure instead of sitting beside one another on a group organisation chart.
“We have now proven our acquisition, integration and turnaround story four times in four years,” said Chris Revord, Head of Finance at Amilo. “With heavy AI usage across all functions, the platform keeps getting more robust — and we are extending it across the commerce and distribution space.”
That model reflects a wider shift in Southeast Asian logistics. The sector remains highly fragmented, with thousands of local providers strong in individual cities, corridors or services but weak across borders. For startups and mid-sized logistics players, building everything organically can be slow and capital-intensive. Buying capability is faster, but only if integration does not create more complexity.
This is where many logistics roll-ups stumble. Warehouses may run on different systems, fleets may follow different routing logic, and customs processes may depend on local expertise that is hard to standardise. Amilo is arguing that repeated integration makes each acquisition cheaper and faster because the target operating system does not change.
Whether that continues to hold as the company expands will be the test. Cross-border logistics is a low-error, low-margin business, and mistakes are visible quickly: delayed parcels, inaccurate duty estimates and poor customer updates can damage both merchant trust and marketplace ratings.
Why ShipX matters
For Amilo, ShipX brings expertise in one of the harder segments of logistics. Domestic fulfilment is challenging, but cross-border shipping adds more variables: changing tariff regimes, fuel-price pressure, destination-specific documentation and fragmented last-mile partners in receiving markets.
“SG Link, now ShipX, is an amazing team,” said Arun Mambully, founder and CEO of Amilo. “Their knowledge of complex cross-border processes is a core pillar of our strategy of helping millions of ASEAN SMEs expand globally. Despite fuel-price and tariff-war pressure, our teams have come together very well and delivered positive growth in the first half of this year.”
The reference to tariffs and fuel costs is important. Cross-border shipping has become more volatile in recent years, affected by geopolitical tensions, supply chain disruptions and fluctuating air and sea freight prices. For smaller merchants, those changes can wipe out margins quickly if delivery costs or landed duties are misquoted.
A more integrated cross-border service could help sellers show clearer shipping costs to consumers, reduce failed deliveries and avoid surprise charges. It could also make it easier for merchants to test new markets without setting up overseas warehousing from day one.
Rivals in a crowded logistics field
Amilo is not alone in trying to own more of the commerce logistics chain. In Southeast Asia, Ninja Van has built one of the region’s largest delivery networks, alongside J&T Express and Flash Express, while Janio has long focused on cross-border logistics for e-commerce merchants. Global incumbents such as DHL eCommerce, FedEx, UPS and Aramex also serve exporters with international shipping, customs and fulfilment products. The difference Amilo is trying to claim lies in combining acquisitions, warehousing, marketplace integrations and cross-border shipping on one proprietary platform. That integrated pitch may appeal to growing sellers, though larger rivals still have advantages in scale, brand trust and global infrastructure.
AI on top of physical infrastructure
Amilo is also positioning the deal as a foundation for heavier use of artificial intelligence across logistics decisions. The company says the hard infrastructure — warehouses, delivery capacity, licences and border processes — has already been built or acquired, and that AI can now sit on top of those rails.
In practical terms, that could mean smarter routing, automated customs checks, better demand forecasting, exception handling and customer support agents that help merchants resolve delivery issues faster. But logistics is a sector where AI claims can easily run ahead of reality. Automation is useful only when the underlying process is stable; otherwise, it can simply accelerate errors.
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Amilo appears aware of that risk. Its argument is that it has first standardised the operating base, and only then layered intelligence onto it. Future acquisitions, it says, should integrate more quickly as more migration work becomes automated.
For Southeast Asian SMEs, the promise is straightforward: fewer systems, fewer intermediaries and fewer blind spots between a warehouse shelf at home and a customer abroad. For Amilo, the ShipX deal is another step towards becoming not just a logistics provider, but the connective tissue for regional merchants trying to sell to the world.
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