Augment, a U.S. startup developing artificial intelligence tools for freight and logistics, said on Thursday it raised $85 million in a Series A funding round led by Redpoint, with participation from 8VC, Autotech Ventures, and other investors.
The round comes just five months after Augment emerged from stealth with a $25 million seed round. The company was founded last year by Harish Abbott, co-founder of e-commerce shipping startup Deliverr, which sold to Shopify for $2.1 billion in 2022.
Abbott said the company’s AI assistant, called Augie, is designed to automate manual and repetitive work carried out by shippers, carriers, and brokers. “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.”
Augie currently performs seven tasks in the logistics workflow, including reviewing pricing bids, tracking shipments, consolidating loads, and managing invoices. The assistant operates across multiple communication platforms such as email, SMS, Slack, and Telegram.
Although Augment has not disclosed revenue figures, Abbott said the company has more than doubled its customer base since its seed round. Clients including Armstrong Transport Group have reported productivity improvements, such as a 40% reduction in invoice delays.
“The customer feedback is honestly amazing. People really love the product. I think they use it in quite a ubiquitous way,” Jacob Effron, managing director at Redpoint, said of his decision to invest.
The new capital will fund the hiring of 50 engineers and the addition of new product 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.”
For now, Augment is focused on the trucking industry but plans to expand into international shipping and other logistics segments. Abbott said competition from rivals such as Vooma, FleetWorks, FedEx, and UPS does not deter him. “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.”