OnTruck picks up €25M Series B for its haulage tech platform

Madrid-based OnTruck, which has built a “haulage tech platform” to better match supply and demand in the road freight industry, has picked up €25 million in Series B funding.

The round is led by global venture capital fund Cathay Innovation, with participation from an array of existing and new investors that includes Atomico, Idinvest, All Iron Ventures, Total Energy Ventures, GP Bullhound, Point 9 Capital, and Samaipata Ventures. In other words, several of OnTruck’s Series A backers are doubling down.

Founded in 2016, OnTruck is one of numerous startups attempting to ‘digitise’ the freight market, which it traditionally quite an arcane and opaque industry. It enables companies who have road freight shipping needs in Spain and more recently the U.K. to connect with the startup’s network of over 2,200 lorry drivers operating in both countries.

For the truck drivers themselves, many of whom are owner-operator businesses, OnTruck offers a steady stream of readily priced work. Its logistics platform also claims to make haulage journeys more efficient.

Specifically, OnTruck describes its technology as automating the matching of loads to trucks, and providing real-time GPS tracking of all shipments. The company’s algorithms also attempt to dispatch work in a way that significantly cuts down on empty return journeys, which is a particularly common problem for the regional and short-haul market OnTruck is targeting.

“Regional trucking is where shippers and truck drivers suffer from the most inefficiency, with over 40% of kilometers driven empty,” says OnTruck CEO Iñigo Juantegui. “This is where OnTruck’s technology and our shipper and driver app can add the most value to lower supply chain cost for shippers and empty kilometres driven by truckers.”

OnTruck clients include large multinationals such as Procter & Gamble, and Decathlon, in addition to over 400 mid-sized companies in the U.K. and Spain. Juantegui says the new funding will be used to consolidate its market positions in those two countries, and to expand to more of Europe. This, I’m told, is likely to include France and Germany.