Ontruck, a Madrid-based startup that has built an “on-demand logistics platform” to connect businesses directly with road freight carriers, has raised $10 million in Series A funding.
The round was led by VCs Atomico and Idinvest, with participation from existing backers Point Nine Capital, La Famiglia, and Samaipata Ventures. Noteworthy, LocalGlobe also previously invested in the company but I understand hasn’t joined this current (and oversubscribed) round.
Founded in 2016, Ontruck is one of numerous startups attempting to ‘digitise’ the road freight market and bring with it a little more transparency to what is still a very arcane and opaque industry. It enables companies who have road freight shipping needs to get an instant price for their desired destination, date, and truck specifications. Precise pick-up slots can be selected, and, a bit like an Uber, shipments are traceable throughout the journey.
On the supply side, truck drivers and large fleet managers accept jobs via the Ontruck app on a first-come-first-claim basis in accordance with their schedule and whereabouts, thus “increasing the utilisation of their assets, and getting paid automatically, on-time and with reliability”.
This might all sound painstakingly obvious, but you need to keep in mind that logistics, including road freight, is still quite an old-fashioned industry where a lot of business is conducted over phone, email and even fax, and via a middle person — a freight broker, if you will — who manually matches supply and demand and takes up to 15 per cent for doing so. As you can imagine, this makes for a cumbersome and quite opaque process, with limited traceability.
In addition, I’m told that a lot of road freight businesses…