FleetWorks raises $17 million to match trucks to loads faster

According to Paul Singer, the 1000’s of small trucking corporations that help move goods around the United States operate in a reasonably old-fashioned way. He would know – he left his job as a product manager at Uber Freight to start a company called FleetWorkswhich he believes will modernize the situation.

Launched during Y Combinator in the summer of 2023, FleetWorks is developing a marketplace that uses artificial intelligence to more quickly match carrier corporations with goods that need to be moved, saving more time for employees on either side of the transaction.

Singer and co-founder Quang Tran, who worked on “moon projects” at Airbnb, thinks it’s a huge opportunity and has found serious support: FleetWorks says it has onboarded greater than 10,000 carriers and dozens of brokers (including Singer’s former employer, Uber Freight) to its marketplace in the first six months.

To push things further, FleetWorks has raised $17 million for hiring, industrial development and product development, including a newly introduced “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 FleetWorks’ Series A round.

“We ultimately selected First Round Capital to lead the round because I believe they are a leading investor in early-stage investing,” Singer said in an interview. “They were some of the few who really understood that we were building a market company.”

Trenchard, who was also an early investor in Flexport, told TechCrunch that he believes artificial intelligence is the best way to manage all these kinds of transactions, especially for small corporations.

“Traditional software is just not good at this. You structure data before you even know exactly all the elements needed to structure it, and you put people through a cheese grater,” he said. “It’s obviously much more open because you can have conversations with people and discover what their real interests are.”

There are many startups and established corporations that are trying to apply artificial intelligence in transportation and logistics. Oway, one other YC-backed startup, is working on something like Uber freight, packing full trucks that may otherwise be half empty. Uber Freight also enables its Fortune 500 customers to use a customized LLM tool to sort through all of their data. Flexport, which does more global shipping, made a suite of AI tools available to its customers in February.

When creating FleetWorks, Singer and Tran focused on the communications that power the world of trucking. Singer said it tries to understand how each operator wants to communicate and will provide them with a mixture of pre-built and custom-built voice and text models depending on their needs.

“Do they want a phone call? Do they want an SMS? Do they want to come to our website and talk to an agent there?” he said. From there, FleetWorks artificial intelligence agents help match freight to truck drivers by learning, among other things, where truck drivers might be, when they might be there and what price they may need to move the load. FleetWorks AI may handle more granular but essential details reminiscent of: Is the driver going to a facility that requires steel-toed boots? Or perhaps the truck driver needs to be home by Friday to be with his family?

These are all things carriers and truck drivers already do under the current system. But it often takes dozens (or more) of calls, texts and emails to get this a part of the job done, Singer said. For small carrier fleets, which make up the overwhelming majority of the industry, time is money.

“Sometimes we imagine freight as a very rigid thing, but it’s actually a very fluid system on both sides. So for brokers, appointment pick-up times may change or the price may change as the load becomes more critical as we get closer to the pick-up time,” Singer said. “The data collected by these two sites kind of feeds the AI-powered brain, and when we detect a match, we can simply feed one of the carriers using FleetWorks directly into the broker’s system.”

AI software requires a lot of detail and nuance, so to reduce hallucinations, Singer said FleetWorks relies on a series of background models that are designed to specialize in specific tasks. The always-active dispatcher then retrieves data from these separate agents.

But it isn’t just about technology – Singer says he learned this lesson from his time at Uber Freight. “[It’s] about helping customers manage change, teaching your team how to use it and showing them that there are opportunities to impact your business,” he said. “We’ve gotten really good at implementing AI, not only building core agents.”

This was also a big advantage for Trenchard. “One of the things we’re excited about about artificial intelligence, and generally speaking, is that it adapts to behaviors that humans already have,” he said. “It does not require changing the way we do business.

While there is a lot of Uber DNA in what FleetWorks is creating, Singer is not shortsighted. He said there are a lot of young software talents who want to work on solving problems in the physical world. In fact, Singer joked that he’s already hired several engineers who have not seen “Shrek” (2001).

“I never thought I would feel like an old head,” he said.