Trucking Finds Interest From Investors, Unicorns and Others

There’s noise that trucking is going to be a $1 trillion dollar industry by 2024. At least to me, this statistic is surprising given that trucking seems like a traditional, slow-moving industry. But investors and startups alike are interested in shaking up the way this lucrative industry operates. So to put this in perspective, we did a round-up of recent news.

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The big headline-maker, covered here, is KeepTruckin, which raised $149 million in a Series D late last month to help companies manage their fleets and drivers. The trucking unicorn is now valued at $1.4 billion.

Here’s a chart on KeepTruckin’s known funding rounds.

In fact, innovation is touching all points in the process – from drivers with the cargo to retailers and their end-users or customers.

On the drive side, Kargo Myanmar today raised a seed round of $800,000 from Cocoon Capital, which created a fund specifically for Southeast Asian startups in deep tech, fintech and medtech.

Kargo Myanmar describes itself as a marketplace for trucks. According to the Myanmar Times, the company wants to link up truck drivers who aren’t getting much business with companies that need them. The company also wants to eventually provide farmers in rural Myanmar with access to logistics services directly, the Times reported.

From the customer angle, Berlin and Hamburg-based startup FreightHub raised $30 million last week. The company wants to make freight more “digital.” It provides real-time insights and transparency to customers with an eye not only on rail freight, but also services for the sea and air. It has 1,500 customers, Freightwaves reported.

Finally, from the company perspective, Data Gumbo said it raised a $6 million Series A to add blockchain to the oil and gas industry’s supply chain. Another traditional industry that you wouldn’t think was ready to be tech-ified. The founder, Andrew Bruce, told Crunchbase News that two years ago, people in the oil and gas industry would have ignored this kind of concept. Now, he said, they’re listening.

These funding rounds, just from the past few weeks, provide a little more fuel to the observation that tech in trucking is moving forward.

Illustration: Li-Anne Dias