A US trucking app called Convoy has raised $63 million in funding as investors, such as billionaires Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos, back the road transport industry.
Convoy connects truckies with freight, much like Uber’s trucking offering ‘Uber Freight’ aims to do, and is part of a growing number of services aiming to capitalise on the multibillion-dollar road transport industry.
Since the company’s inception in 2015, Convoy has raised $80 million and gained the support of big business players like Ebay founder Pierre Omidyar and Salesforce chief executive Marc Benioff.
According to data firm CB Insights and Reuters, trucking tech startups have raised $478 million between January and June this year and are expected to exceed last year’s $763 million in fundraising.
Services like Convoy and Uber Freight aim to remove the outdated phone-based middleman associated with freight movements, acting less like a traditional broker and more like a conduit directly between shippers and drivers.
For truckies, this means more time driving and less time finding loads, as well as lower prices for shippers who aren’t paying hefty commissions or paying the wage of call centre staff.
“We are officially a broker today, but we are building something that hasn’t existed before,” Convoy co-founder Dan Lewis told Reuters.
“It doesn’t look at 60 trucks, it looks at 60,000 trucks and can match loads using predictive analytics.
“That is a complete game changer in the business.”
Convoy claims about 10,000 transport companies use the app, with thousands of shipments completed each week through the service.
While smaller, similarly-focused companies exist down under, whether we get the likes of Uber Freight and Convoy in Australia is an unknown. Would you use apps like these to book loads? Listen to Convoy co-founder Dan Lewis discuss how the idea was born, below.