Logistics is the name of the game during the holiday season: Companies that can seal the deal and get people and things to the places they need to be, on time, rake it in this time of year.
But behind that demand lies a huge amount of inefficiency and fragmentation. Are logistics businesses ready for AI to help run their services better? A startup called Boon thinks the answer is yes. It has now raised $20.5 million to prove that out, by way of a platform to help them make better use of data from disparate applications, to improve their operations, planning, and overall efficiency.
“Think of Boon as the second employee in the back office,” said Deepti Yenireddy, the company's founder and CEO, in an interview. “Our AI agent is like another teammate doing critical work so that people can focus on tasks that actually make them more money.”
The funding is coming from Marathon and Redpoint, which have backed it in a $15.5 million Series A and a previously undisclosed $5 million seed.
Taking just goods carriers alone, there are more than 60 million fleet vehicles globally, according to research from Berg Insight, with the vast majority of the companies operating them classified as SMEs.
Meanwhile, the tools they use are equally scattered: accounting, routing, sales, HR — on average between 15 and 20 different apps and pieces of software are used to run a logistics or fleet company, all existing in silos surrounded by reams of physical paperwork.
As Urvashi Barooah, the partner who led the investment for Redpoint Ventures, described it, “first-generation point solution software tools have added a heavy administrative load” to fleet management companies.
Boon thinks it can speed up efficiency in those systems tenfold with its AI tooling.
Focusing initially on revenue and operations workflows — for example, to help build more efficient routing and find the best places to fuel up — the plan is to use the funding to expand the kinds of workflows it can cover, such as to help improve how containers are loaded or how to optimize staffing.
Yenireddy said she came up with the idea for Boon while at her previous job as senior director of product at the fleet operations giant Samsara. “We know this customer deeply, from my past experience leading product, telematics, and international product at Samsara,” she said. “These customers want a single place and a single platform. They’re doing so many things, and they want simplicity in the technology they adopt. That’s the reason and motivation behind building this.”
She also has a track record as a founder, having previously built an AI company in the HR sector that she sold to Phenom People, an AI recruitment platform. So rather than consider how she might build this within Samsara, she struck out to build it as Boon. “Once a founder, always a founder,” Yenireddy said. She has pulled together alums Apple, DoorDash, Google, Samsara, and Shell to bolster her vision. (And it’s actively hiring now for more go-to-market people and engineers.)