SoftBank, Volvo back Flock Freight with $113.5M to help shippers share the load

Published December 1, 2020

Everyday thousands of trucks carry freight along U.S. highways, propelling the economy forward as consumer goods, electronics, cars and agriculture make their way to distribution centers, stores and eventually households. It’s inside these trucks — many of which sit half empty — where Flock Freight, a five-year-old startup out of San Diego, believes it can transform the industry.

Now, it has the funds to try and do it.

Flock Freight said Tuesday it has raised $113.5 million in a Series C round led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2. Existing investors SignalFire, GLP Capital Partners and Google Ventures also participated in the round, in addition to a new minority investment by strategic partner Volvo Group Venture Capital. Ervin Tu, managing partner at SoftBank Investment Advisers, will join Flock Freight’s board. The company, which has raised $184 million to date, has post-funding valuation of $500 million, according to a source familiar with the deal who confirmed an earlier report by Bloomberg.

A slew of startups have popped up in the past several years all aiming to use technology to transform trucking — the backbone of the U.S. economy that moves more than 70% of all U.S. freight — into a more efficient machine. Most have focused on building digital freight networks that connect truckers with shippers.

Flock Freight has focused instead on the shipments themselves. The company created a software platform that helps pool shipments into a single shared truckload to make carrying freight more efficient. Flock Freight says its software avoids the traditional hub-and-spoke system, which is dominated by trucks with less than a full load, known in the industry as LTL. Flock Freight says that by pooling onto one truck shipments that are going the same direction, freight-related carbon emissions can be reduced by 40%.

Improving the logistics of trucking, San Diego’s Flock Freight raises $50 million

The funds will be used to hire more employees; it has 129 employees to date.

“Unlike the digital freight-matching category that uses technology to simply improve efficiency as workflow automation, Flock Freight uses technology to power a new shipping mode (shared truckload) that makes freight transportation more efficient. The impact of Flock Freight’s algorithms is that shippers no longer need to adhere to LTL constraints for freight that measures up to 44 linear feet; instead, they can classify it as ‘shared truckload,’ ” Oren Zaslansky, founder and CEO of Flock Freight said in a statement. “Shippers can use Flock Freight’s efficient shared truckload solution to accommodate high demand and increased urgency.”

Their pitch has been compelling enough to attract a diverse mix of venture firms and corporate investors such as Volvo and SoftBank.

“Flock Freight is improving supply chain efficiency for hundreds of thousands of shippers. Our investment is intended to accelerate the company’s ability to scale its business and capture a greater share of the market,” said Tu, managing partner at SoftBank Investment Advisers.

Improving the logistics of trucking, San Diego’s Flock Freight raises $50 million

Published February 27, 2020

“We want to change the way freight moves,” says Oren Zaslansky, the chief executive and founder of Flock Freight.

His company, which has been operating in stealth mode for the last two years, has finally emerged with a new solution for freight shipping that purports to bring in more money to shippers, remove inefficiencies in the current hub-and-spoke model for freight and offer better deals to shipping customers.

He’s also got $50 million in financing in the bank in what is one of the largest recent investments in a San Diego-based company.

For Zaslansky, the shipping business is a family affair. “My parents grew up in the moving business… I grew up around both entrepreneurship and freight,” he says.

Those twin passions led him to start his own trucking business out of college in the San Diego area. He also launched a brokerage business to support supply chain logistics. The exposure to both is what led Zaslansky to launch Flock Freight and its big new financing round, which closed earlier this week.

The company raised its cash to change the way shippers move small amounts of goods — those less-than-a-truckload-sized amounts that have to move through hub-and-spoke operations which increase the time goods are on the road and the possibility for breakage as they’re unloaded and reloaded onto different delivery vehicles.

“We want to disintermediate the infrastructure of hub and spoke,” says Zaslansky. “We want to carpool. We use our technology to change the way freight moves.”

Zaslansky isn’t talking about very small orders that can be delivered through a service like Roadie — the delivery company that raised $39 million from investors led by Home Depot back in February 2019.

This is still trucking — it’s a carpool in a 70-foot-long tractor trailer. Flock Freight works by reaching out to small and mid-size trucking companies and integrating their orders onto the shipments that these firms are already making. “We go to the carriers that are much more used to working with a third party to fill up empty trucks,” Zaslansky says.

Right now, that’s about 15% of the $110 billion freight and logistics trucking market, Zaslansky says.

The new investments into Flock Freight came from SignalFire and GLP Capital Partners in mid-February and they were likely drawn to the company’s claims that its service can eliminate damage claims, collect freight from multiple shippers and optimize route delivery for a 40% savings in fuel emissions, and the guaranteed delivery rate of 97.5%.

Companies like Tuft & Needle and Titan Supply Group are already using the company’s services, according to a statement from Flock Freight.

Flock Freight makes its market by having a window into the spare capacity of trucks and charging shippers for the exact amount of capacity that they’re using. “We want to go to a shipper and say — that [cargo] is 75% of the truck and we’ll charge you 75% of the truck,” said Zaslansky. For carriers, they can say that the price they’ve charged is for 100% of the truck and Flock Freight will add another 10 feet of freight and an additional $1,000 into a carrier’s pocket, Zaslansky said.