FleetWorks raises $17M to match truckers with cargo faster

Summary

The thousands of small trucking companies that help move goods around the United States have a fairly old-school way of doing things, according to Paul Singer. He would know — he left his product manager job at Uber Freight to start a company called FleetWorks, which he believes will modernize things. Created during Y Combinator’s Summer 2023 batch, FleetWorks has been developing a marketplace that leverages artificial intelligence to make faster matches between carrier companies and goods that need to be moved, freeing up more time for workers on both sides of the transaction. Singer and co-founder Quang Tran, who worked on “moonshot projects” at Airbnb, think it’s a massive opportunity, and they’ve found some serious buy-in: FleetWorks claims to have brought more than 10,000 carriers and dozens of brokers (including Singer’s old employer Uber Freight) onto its marketplace in the first six months. To push things further, FleetWorks has raised $17 million to put towards hiring, commercial expansion, and product development, including a newly-launched “always-on” AI dispatcher. The funding includes a $15 million Series A round led by First Round Capital’s Bill Trenchard, who also led Uber’s seed round in 2010. Y Combinator, Saga Ventures, and LFX Venture Partners also participated in the Fleetworks Series A. “We ultimately went with First Round Capital to lead the round because, I mean, I think they are the preeminent investor in early stage investing,” Singer said in an interview. “They were one of the few who really understood that we were we were building a marketplace company.” Trenchard, who was also an early investor in Flexport, told TechCrunch in an interview that he thinks AI is the best way to manage all of these transactions, especially for small businesses. “Traditional software is just not good at this. You’re structuring data before you even know exactly all of the elements that you need to structure, and you’re pushing people through your cheese grater...