Augment raises $85M Series A to bring AI agents to the $10T logistics industry

waiting room. We've kept him waiting. We will bring him in from augment. Big news today. We're very excited. Play some soundboard for me, JD. Thank you. Welcome to the stream. Sorry to keep you waiting. We have some breaking news in the world. We had to dig in. It was only available at 1:40.

So, thank you for taking the time. Hey, no, no problems. Very excited to be here. Thanks for having me. Of course. Uh, break it down for us. What is the news? Well, the big news is that, you know, we're um announcing our um series A, which is an $85 million series. Congratulations. Big number. Big number. And uh yeah.

Yeah. Walk me through the the state of the business. Yeah. So, you know, we're building Augment, which is um you know, our first product is Auggie, which is think of it as an AI teammate for the logistics world.

Um it's getting deployed actively over 35 billion in freight under management across brokers, shippers and and fleets. Um and so early I mean we know we are a year old company but it's showing a lot of promise in in the real world and that's why the investors were interested. Great. That's amazing.

What what about shipping and logistics has drawn so many it's it's uh you guys seem to be you know leading the charge out here but it's certainly a competitive space like what what about this industry in the category makes it uh so prime for agents did it kind of skip the SAS era like it feels like it feels like it's the last industry we're still oh yeah they're still on paper so they're jumping straight to agents yeah and you're getting 10 phone calls you're getting 10 phone calls a today from the same person just being like, "Hey, where's my stuff?

Hey, where's my stuff? Hey, where's my stuff? " Ridiculous. Yeah. You know, like it's a very large industry, right? It's like 10 trillion dollars globally, but it's extremely fragmented. Like in the US it's there's like 1 million truck driving companies. I'm not exaggerating, but that's what it is.

1 million truck driving companies, you know. Wow. There maybe tens of thousands of brokerages, hundreds of thousands of shippers. Extremely fragmented, right?

And so when this fragmented industry which really relies on transferring information to get things done to move goods like that's the whole job of this industry is that hey I'll give you information so I can give you goods right that's the whole thing.

Um and it's so fragmented the only way to transfer information is to get to the lowest common mediums. Now what is the lowest common medium among a million different companies? It's phone calls. It's text. It's emails. The fax machine. Is the fax machine still going strong?

fax mach you know I actually have seen fax machines in some of my class still happening invoices coming through payments going through fax machines so I mean every form of information there's like there's handwritten notes being mailed by drivers today on what was their pickup time and delivery time when they get into a driver tux drop they literally have mailboxes where they can mail you know one of those receipts for getting paid like that's how you know sometimes it's archaic the communication is yeah talk about lessons from the last company deliver uh sold to Shopify in 2022 for $2.

1 billion. Congratulations obviously uh how are you positioning the different uh the business differently and what are the key lessons that you learned from that business that you're hoping to take forward?

Yeah, I mean I think you know uh deliver was building like a prime like service for Shopify type merchants uh forward going inventory.

Um I mean the big lessons here has been like focus you know customer success is like stay stay very true to customer delight everything else is a noise like literally everything else you know whether your investors like you or not if your customer delight is there everybody will follow you capital will chase you know great employees would want to join you customers would want to join you so I mean I'm hoping I'm carrying that forward right um now in in terms of like things that I did not do well um at deliver Um I think we there was like a lack of focus sometimes, right?

Like um as as the capital was getting easier, we were maybe trying to do a little too many things like launching too many products and those were the really great days of attracting capital because the interest rates were near zero. So the capital was mostly free.

Um and I would have for mostly free capital cost of co cost of capital going up has been heartbreaking. It's been heartbreaking.

what is that going from half a percent to now 4 and a half% right not easy but I think it does bring it does bring discipline to things right like hey you've got when you have limited capital you deploy it in the things that truly matter so maybe like what I'm hopefully not doing this time is like doing things that truly matter move the needle for your customers but just not start creating teams and products that you know look good on paper yeah how do you think about uh vertical integration uh you obviously sell into 3PL's shippers uh do you want to own the the warehouse management stack at some point?

Do you want to integrate deeply with all the different WMS's? What's the plan there? Yeah, we we we do not want to own the WMS stack or the transportation management stack or the order manage. We don't we want to sit on top. We want to integrate into all of them.

We think of ourselves as a you know first and foremost and Auggie is an employee that works like a thousands of employees 24/7.

um achieves a lot of operational efficiency for our businesses but long term I think augment does become a system of work and I think there will be a system of work and a system of record in most companies so the WMS the TMS the MS all the MS's in the word will stay to be very relevant system of records but there will be a new generation of companies hopefully augment is one of them that'll become the system of work itself and these two will work together very closely with each other you know so fantastic well congrats on the massive raise.

Congrats on all the progress and thank you for taking the time to talk to us. Have a great weekend. We'll talk to you soon. Congratulations to be here. Yeah, congrats to the whole team. Crushing it. Cheers. We'll talk to you soon. Our next guest is in the reream waiting room. We have base 10.

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