News / Flexport invests in tech start-up that can cut out truck brokerage fees

© Andrii Yalanskyi

Flexport has invested in a start-up which connects shippers to truckers directly, cutting out freight brokerage fees.

Zerobroker, founded in 2017, announced today it had raised $6.5m in a seed round from companies including Funders Club and Streamlined Ventures, as well as Flexport.

The start-up claims its platform will eliminate all brokerage fees, which it says total $300bn in the US, and will manage end-to-end logistics “from creating a shipment, finding, vetting and booking a truck, to managing the payment and paperwork and updating all stakeholders in less than 60 seconds”.

Founder and CEO Georgy Melkonyan, said: “I’ve seen everyone from start-ups to Fortune 500 teams spend entire days reaching out to brokers to get quotes, managing loads with very limited visibility, chasing paperwork and managing both suppliers and customers, all manually. And on top of that, freight brokers charge 20-30% commission for every transaction.

“Our platform helps logistics and operations teams to cut 100% of freight brokerage fees and automate up to 90% of repetitive tasks,” he added.

Ullas Naik, general partner at investor Streamlined Ventures, said the freight industry was “still far behind in terms of technology adoption and innovation”.

Mr Melkonyan is said to have 15 years’ logistics experience and his LinkedIn profile shows three years at Vizit, an industrial automation company he co-founded, and five years as co-founder at BM Torg, which appears to be a now-defunct Ukrainian company that had been “optimising logistics”.

San Francisco-based Zerobroker, part of YCombinator, launched its platform in February last year and claims to have grown 50% month on month since. Its customers include fellow venture-backed start-ups, SMEs and mid-sized manufacturers, it said.