Harish Abbott, co-founder and CEO of Deliverr, knows the logistics industry well after building and selling his e-commerce shipping startup to Shopify for $2.1 billion in 2022. He identified that many manual tasks in logistics could be automated using AI. This insight led him to launch Augment last year. The company offers an AI assistant called Augie that takes over tedious and repetitive work performed by freight shippers, carriers, and brokers.
On Thursday, Augment announced it has raised an $85 million Series A funding round. The round was led by Redpoint, with participation from 8VC, Autotech Ventures, and others. This substantial investment comes just five months after the startup launched out of stealth with a significant $25 million seed round.
Freight and logistics is a very large industry that employs many people who spend their days busy chasing emails, documents, phone calls, and text messages. Augie is designed to take care of all that work like a personal assistant, allowing human workers to focus on building relationships and handling negotiations.
Today, Augie can perform seven key tasks in the logistics process. These include gathering and reviewing pricing bids from trucking companies, tracking packages en route, building a load to maximize truck space, and collecting invoicing documents to ensure timely billing. These processes typically involve numerous phone calls, emails, or texts exchanged between various participants. Augie helps 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 its number of customers since raising its seed round. Although many customers are still trialing the product, fully onboarded clients like Armstrong Transport Group are already achieving significant productivity gains, such as a 40% reduction in invoice delays.
Jacob Effron, a managing director at Redpoint, decided to invest in Augment after speaking with a number of its clients. He stated that the customer feedback is honestly amazing and that people really love the product, using it in a quite ubiquitous way.
The large Series A funding will be used to hire 50 engineers and to work on adding more features. Abbott explained that the market is large, fragmented, complex, and messy, with archaic and siloed systems. Many engineers are required because of the numerous 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 stated on earnings calls that they are building in-house AI assistants to facilitate freight movements.
All the competition does not phase Abbott. He said the company has tremendous adoption and that Augie does really cool stuff. He emphasized that Augie is capable of thinking ahead and reasoning like a human, then acting on it, which saves everybody a lot of time.