Volvo Group Venture Capital is part of a lineup of investors that recently participated in a Series B funding round for Texas-based tech-powered trucking company aifleet, bringing its total funding to almost $50 million following this recent influx of $16.6 million.
Aifleet said it plans to use this capital boost to continue to scale its fleet, infrastructure and processes and to invest in research and development to continue to improve optimization algorithms; in technology to automate operations and back-office functions to achieve best-in-class driver to FTE ratios; and in its sales team to accelerate the transition to contract freight.
“The U.S. full-truckload (FTL) market size is $400 billion, but it’s a massively inefficient and fragmented market with half a million carriers, where even the biggest has less than 1% of the market. As truck utilization has trended downward since 2018, aifleet has developed technology to mitigate the utilization problem to radically improve trucking efficiencies, while bringing real humanity back to the driver experience,” said Marc El Khoury, co-founder and CEO of aifleet. “We are excited about Volvo's investment, and we are looking forward to continuing to leverage our technology to create a more sustainable fleet and industry.”
Volvo Group said its investment is mutually beneficial through shared learnings and opportunities with the aifleet technology. aifleet’s disruption of the U.S. transportation market with AI to achieve superior margins and enable consolidation creates a potential for high-value creation, and productizing the in-house solution as software as a service (SaaS) to other trucking companies will increase market impact and provide additional impact, Volvo Group added.
“aifleet is addressing inefficiencies in the trucking industry in a differentiated manner, building technology and proving out its capabilities through their own fleet operations,” said Joe Darcy, investor at Volvo Group Venture Capital. “Not only are they increasing the utilization of the trucks on the road but also making sure drivers have an optimized working environment.”
aifleet’s proprietary artificial intelligence and technology suite aims to improve the trucking industry by optimizing route and load planning in real time, making scheduling more efficient, reducing cost per mile and sustainably reducing the number of trucks needed on the road, while ensuring drivers are paid and treated well.
With end-to-end automation, aifleet said it is able to generate over 40% higher utilization than the industry average. The company’s AI manages 20 quintillion permutations per truck per week, equaling 250,000 loads per week and $20 billion in orders per year. The company offers freight customers enhanced visibility, more capacity so customers don’t need to rely on multiple carriers, and AI that automatically responds to any customer inquiries.
“We are all in on truly disrupting the trucking industry with our unique AI technology, and that’s leading to better outcomes for all: a better experience for drivers, a better impact on the economy and a better impact on the environment — all in service of our purpose to humanize trucking,” El Khoury said.
Other investors that participated in this funding round include Obvious Ventures, Ibex Investors, Compound, Winthrop Square and Cooley.
