Freightmate Ai announced on Thursday that it has secured a pre-seed funding round led by Wischoff Ventures and is releasing its first automated solution.
The funds will be used to enhance the features of its freight forwarding management system, which is being developed by technology experts with experience from Geodis, Manhattan Associates, Amazon Global Logistics and Flexport.
“Freight forwarders coordinate global shipments from end to end from origin country to destination country, leveraging decades-old software with zero task automation, no real-time communication, with a very limited UX,” said Nichole Wischoff, founder and general partner at Wischoff Ventures. “While extremely audacious, a next-gen-AI-powered freight management system can drive higher margins, decrease head count, improve visibility and tracking, and universally make freight forwarders far more competitive.”
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“Most startups are focused on solving for a tiny sliver of the larger problem. Freightmate Ai is tackling a rebuild of legacy infrastructure powering one of the biggest drivers of our global economy. I am excited to back Bryan [Lacaillade], Jason [Zhao], and Rishab [Gadroo], who have spent years of their lives solving several parts of this larger problem,” she said in the release.
Co-founders Lacaillade, chief executive officer; Zhao, chief operating officer; and Gadroo, chief technology officer, found that throughout their industry experience, they continued to see freight forwarders faltering on their technology journey.
“We found there were two paths for freight forwarders,” Lacaillade told FreightWaves. “One is they build their own in-house systems, which are typically super simple, usually basically an Excel spreadsheet with functions. Or they invest in one of several key enterprise solutions that were founded in the ’80s, ’90s and early 2000s.”
He said regardless of which path they took, very little if any automation existed in their workflows.
“There are no AI capabilities because the architectures are so antiquated they can’t integrate AI effectively. There are no real-time collaboration tools, and there is no data analytics to measure operational, team or user performance,” he explained.
While some traditional freight management systems can integrate updated technology, this often comes at an additional cost. Lacaillade believes those integrations are just a Band-Aid and lead to greater investments in added technology and the staff to help support those integrations.
Freightmate Ai is just coming out of stealth mode with Thursday’s announcement and is still at the early stages of building its full automated system.
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Along with securing its funding, the company is launching a beta version of its first solution: an automated documentation system. This system leverages email scraping, document classification, transcription and cross-document data validation to manage over 30 trade-related documents that freight forwarders handle for each shipment.
“This is a huge pain point that we are looking to solve first with our service, and it’s a stepping stone towards our long-term commitment of providing better solutions,” said Lacaillade.
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