Augment is an AI-powered logistics startup founded by the creator of Deliverr. It recently closed an $85 million Series A funding round, led by Redpoint Ventures. This big investment comes in only five months after the company came out of stealth. It comes on the heels of a stunning $25 million seed round. The funding will help Augment enhance its AI assistant, Augie, which is designed to streamline logistics processes and reduce inefficiencies in the freight industry.
Augie has seven key capabilities that help tackle some of the most important pain points within logistics. Our AI assistant collects and analyzes pricing/ bidding bids from different trucking companies so users can make more informed, data-driven decisions in a fraction of the time. It monitors shipments in transit, delivering real-time visibility that’s essential for on-time delivery.
Plus, Augie creates loads by grouping several shipments together to fill a truck, increasing efficiency even more. It aggregates invoicing documents to ensure on-time billing. Plus, it makes communications more seamless by working over any channel such as voice, email, Slack, SMS and Telegram toka. That new capability frees it to automate routine, mind-numbing tasks currently handled by freight shippers, carriers and brokers.
Harish Abbott, co-founder of Augment, stressed the importance of Augie in making complicated logistics work easier to understand.
“Freight and logistics is a very large industry that employs lots of people who are busy chasing emails, documents, phone calls, text messages all day long,” – Harish Abbott
By automating these tedious, day-to-day tasks, Augie frees up logistics professionals to do what they do best – build relationships and negotiate deals. Abbott added,
“Augie can take care of all that like their own personal assistant, so they can focus on relationships and negotiations.”
Beyond producing operations, Augie has the same capacity for reasoning as humans and the capacity to act like them. This feature makes it faster and easier for users to identify where they should focus their time and resources the most.
This significant round will allow Augment to develop Augie’s current features even further, heading into the new year. In addition, it will allow for the hiring of 50 new engineers to continue pushing the company’s hyper-growth. Jacob Effron, a managing director at Redpoint, said he was confident in Augment’s potential after talking to the company’s customers.
“The customer feedback is honestly amazing. People really love the product. I think they use it in quite a ubiquitous way.” – Jacob Effron
One of those clients, Armstrong Transport Group, has already experienced quantifiable improvements in just a few months after adopting Augie’s capabilities. The company was able to deliver a staggering 40% decrease in overdue invoices. This success represents the tangible yields from true operationalization and implementation of AI across logistics enterprise operations.