Logistics is the name of the game during the holiday season: Companies that can close a deal and get people and things to where they need to be, on time, rake in the money this time of year.
But behind this demand lies a huge amount of inefficiency and fragmentation. Are logistics companies ready to use AI to better manage their services? A startup called Bargain think the answer is yes. The company has now raised $20.5 million to prove it, with a platform to help them better use data from disparate applications to improve operations, planning and efficiency overall.
“Think of Boon as the second employee in the back office,” Deepti Yenireddy, founder and CEO, said in an interview. “Our AI agent is like another teammate doing essential work so people can focus on tasks that actually make them more money.”
Funding comes from Marathon and Repoint, who backed it in a $15.5 million Series A and an undisclosed $5 million seed round.
Taking freight carriers alone, there are more than 60 million vehicles worldwide, according to a study by Berg Overviewthe vast majority of companies operating them being classified as SMEs.
Meanwhile, the tools they use are also scattered: accounting, routing, sales, human resources — on average, between 15 and 20 different applications and software are used to run a logistics or fleet business, all existing in silos surrounded by tons of physical paperwork.
As described by Urvashi Barooah, the partner who led the investment for Redpoint Ventures, “first-generation point solution software tools added a heavy administrative burden” to fleet management companies.
Boon believes he can increase the efficiency of these systems tenfold thanks to his AI tools.
With an initial focus on revenue and operations workflows, such as helping to establish more efficient routes and find the best places to refuel, the plan is to use the funding to expand the types of workflows that it can cover — for example to help improve the way containers are loaded, or how to optimize staffing.
Yenireddy said she came up with the idea for Boon while in her previous role as senior product manager at fleet operations giant Samsara. “We know this customer deeply, thanks to my past experience leading product, telematics and international products like Samsara,” she said. “These customers want a unique location and platform. They do so much and want simplicity in the technology they adopt. This is the reason and motivation behind this construction.
She also has experience as a founder, having previously built an AI company in the HR sector which she sold to Phenom People, an AI recruiting platform. So rather than thinking about how she could build this within Samsara, she decided to build it under the name Boon. “Once a founder, always a founder,” Yenireddy said. She brought together the former Apple, DoorDash, Google, Samsara and Shell to strengthen her vision. (And it's now actively recruiting more go-to-market people and engineers.)
Funding comes through strong interest. Boon has paying customers representing 35,000 drivers and 10,000 vehicles on its platform, helping the company reach $1 million in annual revenue after nine months of operation.
This only scratches the surface, and going deeper might result in a few bumps. The actual work of creating a platform that can work intelligently across different data silos to drive business intelligence has been something of a holy grail in the B2B world, at the core of what others large (and heavily funded) startups like H are also trying to do so in the field of “agentic AI”. At the same time, if these applications are truly successful, they could usher in major efficiencies, but could also raise questions about what humans will do next with the extra time.
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