Kontainers' Graham Parker returns – with another big idea
Graham Parker, co-founder of digital start-up ocean freight management platform Kontainers, which was acquired by ...
© Christian Lagereek
By Alex Lennane
As one start-up fades, another thrives. Convoy, a two-year old Seattle-based company matching nearby and available truckers to loads, has attracted financing from Bill Gates’s Cascade Investment in a new round of funding, raising $62m. The company has already got support from Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and had raised $80m before this latest round.
The company offers much the same service as Uber Freight – but it appears that the smart money is not going to Uber, distracted as it currently is by a host of other issues.
It is as yet unclear what sort of volumes Convoy is shifting, but sales volume is doubling every quarter, and customers include companies as big as Unilever. Bloomberg has got the story.
Comment on this article
Sergey Koleda
August 14, 2017 at 3:28 pmThe appearance of another big player on this market means that the niche is still hot. A lot of companies are trying to improve the transportation performance with their uber like apps. Doft, Convoy, Transfix, Uber Freight, Trucker Path… Still no one of them has disrupt the industry. Maybe due to the lack of trust from the shippers. The IT solutions are really great when it comes to automation, so i think it is not a lack of trust in IT. It is all about the model. On demand trucking means that the freight will be given to the first carrier with the available truck. And the shippers have got their preferred carriers.