SignalFire, Flex Capital and Others Invest in Transformative Supply Chain Technology
CHICAGO, Oct. 31, 2022 /PRNewswire/ — For decades, nothing has changed with how trucking companies book shipments. The industry is highly fragmented, making finding the right supplier an outdated, highly manual, time-consuming process. Historically, it has been difficult for technology companies to successfully integrate into Transportation Management Systems (TMS) to consolidate shipments, and while the concept of freight aggregation debuted about five years ago, it is in its infancy, and only about 5 percent of today’s loads are booked digitally.
Newtrul has developed a proprietary, digital freight matching platform that integrates with freight brokers to seamlessly share available loads with carriers digitally in real-time. The carrier platform allows trucking companies to enter Newtrul’s user interface to search for the best shipment across multiple customers for each truck. Think of Newtrul as the Expedia for freight booking.
Consumers use travel aggregators, like Expedia, to connect with countless hotels to find and digitally book available rooms with the best price, amenities, etc., without relying on a travel agent or calling each location. The concept is similar in transportation. Each day, an average of 1.5 million shipments are available to more than 4 million trucking companies looking for loads. Instead of carriers and brokers spending time and resources contacting each other individually, Newtrul’s digital aggregation platform provides an easier, simpler, and more cost-effective way to connect everyone and book more loads faster.
“Daily, over 100,000 different shippers and freight brokers are looking for trucks, and over 4 million semi-trucks are looking for shipments. It’s not a surprise that with over 400 billion permutations, it’s incredibly difficult to find the right vendor/supplier,” said Ed Stockman, Newtrul co-founder and CEO. “We often hear about driver shortages as the main cause for capacity issues, but I’d argue there is a utilization problem that can be solved with the right technology.”
Investors continue to see the opportunities with FreightTech and are fueling Newtrul’s efforts with a new $5.3M capital raise. The infusion will enable Newtrul to refine the communication, CRM and onboarding functions of its platform. Lead investors include SignalFire and Flex Capital as well as previously unannounced investors, including Bessemer Venture Partners, Crowley, Oren Zaslansky, CEO of Flock Freight, John Larkin, and Brad Hollister.
“Brokers pay astronomical premiums to arrange truckload capacity manually over the phone, often wasting over half their margin,” said Chris Farmer, SignalFire founder & CEO. “Newtrul modernizes this outdated practice with its integrated aggregation platform that lets them save both money and time on matching freight with quality carriers. We’ve seen so many other industries gain huge benefits from transitioning to APIs, and Newtrul is delivering this efficiency to the freight logistics sector.”
Communication
Newtrul aims to reduce the amount of time and resources needed for two parties to make a successful transaction. Instead of taking brokers and carriers an average of 45 minutes to find, negotiate and book a load, Newtrul’s platform can make these transactions happen in milliseconds. Faster booking processes allow shippers and brokers to reallocate staff resources to other areas of need.
CRM
Few brokerages have sufficient tools to track carrier preferences, which results in an industry entirely dependent on “tribal knowledge.” By investing in relationship tools, Newtrul collects, optimizes, and returns data that helps brokers easily identify the best truck for a shipment.
One-Click Onboarding
A massive gap between reputable companies and bad actors can lead to tedious vetting processes that tend to be very manual and time-consuming for all parties. Newtrul’s one-click setup process gives trucking companies the ability to onboard with new brokers, unlocking billions of dollars of freight in less than 10 seconds and helping ensure compliance alignment to avoid lost bookings.
Over the past year, Newtrul has added more than 10,000 active carrier users of all sizes to its platform and is currently working with nearly 75 customers.
Newtrul’s most recent capital raise comes at a time when VC activity in the trucking, transportation, and logistics sectors is at an all-time high amid global supply-chain challenges, rising inflation rates and climate concerns. The current raise follows a Seed Series raise of $2.25M in January 2021 led by Autotech Ventures with participation from I2BF, Fission Ventures, and Plug and Play Ventures.
About Newtrul
Newtrul is a technology company helping to increase efficiencies in the trucking industry with a digital freight-aggregation platform. For more information visit www.newtrul.com.
SOURCE Newtrul
