Freightmate Ai announced Thursday it has closed a $5 million seed round led by FUSE VC to continue building out its freight forwarding management system after experiencing rapid growth since a pre-seed raise in June.
Bryan Lacaillade, co-founder and CEO, told FreightWaves in an interview the company focused on the evolution of its document automation service Docmate since its last raise, transforming its beta version into a more robust, scalable product that now supports over 25 document types and integrates simply into customers’ existing systems.
“We’re partnering with over three times the number of freight forwarders that we [anticipated] by this time,” said Lacaillade.
According to the company, the document service is now digitizing and validating documents in less than 10 seconds per document, saving up to two hours of manual document processing per shipment.
“Customer service in this industry is often put on the back burner because they don’t have the bandwidth to do it all,” he said. “Instead of having to do all the tedious work that [employees] don’t enjoy doing, they can now focus on the important conversations that help grow their forwarding business.”
RELATED: Freightmate Ai exits stealth mode with pre-seed funding and new tech
While these products are becoming table stakes in modern global shipping, Lacaillade explained that the founders’ work background at Geodis, Manhattan Associates, Amazon Global Logistics and Flexport has enabled the team to build its algorithms and workflows for freight forwarders’ specific needs.
“There are a lot of generic solutions out there that are not built for a focus on freight forwarding. They have not built workflows to include managing expectations with human intervention, and they are not effective in managing these types of freight documents. … They are not fully doing the job our freight forwarders require of them,” he said.
To continue providing this service, the company will use its seed funding to focus on building products faster, which involves investing in hiring for product development, sales and infrastructure roles.
Part of that growth plan is also bringing the recent outsourced engineering team in-house by opening an office in Bangalore, India. Lacaillade explained this will give the company better control over the technical development process while allowing Freightmate Ai to invest in employees who have the same level of investment in the company’s success.
That level of investment in company success will be needed as the Freightmate Ai team focuses on three key workstreams: continuing to enhance its document automation service, developing new automation services and building out its comprehensive freight management system.
Lacaillade shared with FreightWaves that there will be new service announcements from the company in the coming months.
“There are going to be many changes in global supply chains this year, and that is where a solution like ours becomes extra valuable. We have a system that’s built from the ground up with large language models that are far more adaptable and flexible compared to the rigid systems that are still built on decades-old technology that are a nightmare to reconfigure to modern needs. … This adds value to our long-term work of building an advanced freight management system that we are sprinting as fast as we can to bring to market,” he said.
FreightTech’s tracking superhero lands $40M
How automation is solving logistics’ biggest problems in 2025
Omnitracs, Platform Science IP lawsuit may have reached the end of the road
The post Freightmate Ai raises $5M, highlights need for flexible freight forwarding tech appeared first on FreightWaves.
