Having built and sold e-commerce shipping startup Deliverr to Shopify for $2.1 billion in 2022, co-founder and CEO Harish Abbott knows the logistics industry well.
Abbott felt that many manual tasks in logistics could be automated using AI. That’s why last year he launched Augment, which offers an AI assistant called “Augie” that can take over tedious and repetitive work performed by freight shippers, carriers, and brokers.
On Thursday, Augment announced that it raised an $85 million Series A led by Redpoint, with participation from 8VC, Autotech Ventures, and others. The massive round comes just five months after the startup launched out of stealth with a hefty $25 million seed round.
“Freight and logistics is a very large industry that employs lots of people who are busy chasing emails, documents, phone calls, text messages all day long,” Abbott told TechCrunch. “Augie can take care of all that like their own personal assistant, so they can focus on relationships and negotiations.”
Today, Augie can perform seven key tasks in the logistics process, from gathering and reviewing pricing bids from trucking companies and tracking packages en route, to building a load — the method of combining multiple shipments to maximize truck space — and collecting invoicing documents to ensure timely billing.
All of these processes typically involve numerous phone calls, emails, or texts exchanged between various participants in the logistics process. Augie can help humans streamline those communications by operating across multiple channels like voice, email, Slack, SMS, and Telegram.
While Augment is not disclosing its revenue, Abbott says the company has more than doubled the number of customers it serves since raising its seed round.
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Although many customers are still trialing the product, fully onboarded clients like Armstrong Transport Group are already achieving significant productivity gains with Augment, such as a 40% reduction in invoice delays.
Jacob Effron, a managing director at Redpoint, said he invested in Augment after speaking with a number of Augment’s clients. “The customer feedback is honestly amazing. People really love the product. I think they use it in quite a ubiquitous way.”
The large funding round will go toward hiring 50 engineers and then working on adding more features. “It is a large, fragmented market. It’s complex, it’s messy. The systems are a bit archaic and siloed,” Abbott said. “We have to have many engineers because there’s lots of software systems these companies use.”
The company is currently serving the trucking industry, but its long-term vision is to expand into international shipping and other aspects of logistics.
Abbott is not alone in pursuing AI for logistics. Other AI assistants for freight management include Vooma and FleetWorks. Meanwhile, shipping giants FedEx and UPS have signaled that they are investing in proprietary AI technology.
But all the competition doesn’t phase Abbott. “We have tremendous adoption,” he said. “Augie does really cool stuff. Augie is really thinking ahead and reasoning like a human and acting on it, so it saves everybody a lot of time.”
