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From left: Freightmate co-founders Jason Zhao, Bryan Lacaillade, and Rishab Gadroo. (Freightmate Photo)
Freightmate, a Seattle-area startup that aims to streamline how freight forwarders process documents and data, raised $5 million in a seed round led by Fuse.
Freight forwarders, the companies that help move shipments between shippers and carriers, often deal with more than 60 pages of PDF documents per shipment, according to Freightmate CEO Bryan Lacaillade. They have to monitor email for incoming documents, organize those documents, manually analyze data, and enter information into their own systems.
“This process is incredibly time-consuming, error-prone, and expensive to support,” said Lacaillade, a former director of product management at logistics tech giant Flexport.
Freightmate’s first product, Docmate, automates that process by digitizing and categorizing documents, validating data, and flagging discrepancies, among other features.
Lacaillade said the product helps operations teams spend more time on customer support and sales.
He declined to provide revenue metrics but said demand has been “much higher than anticipated.” Mid-market and enterprise clients are the company’s primary focus.
Lacaillade, who also worked at Amazon, founded the company with Yingwei (Jason) Zhao, who worked at Flexport and Amazon in logistics-related roles, and Rishab Gadroo, who spent 13 years at Amazon in various engineering roles.
“Our founding team has spent most of our careers rolling up our sleeves to build advanced freight management systems for some of the world’s most innovative freight forwarders,” Lacaillade said. “We deeply understand the problem space and have solved these challenges multiple times before.”
Kellan Carter, founding partner at Fuse, called the firm’s investment an “easy decision.”
“Huge and complicated category, exceptional team, beautiful product, and more customer demand than capacity,” he said in a statement.
Freightmate has 14 employees across Bellevue, Wash., and Bangalore, India.
Freightmate is among a growing list of logistics tech startups based in the Seattle region, buoyed by companies including Seattle-based Amazon and Flexport, which has an engineering office in the area. Seattle-area startups such as Logixboard are also building software around freight forwarding, along with several other companies across the country.
Logistics startups raised $4.5 billion in the first half of 2024, according to PitchBook.
