Emerge closes on $20 million in Series A financing

Scottsdale, Arizona-based Emerge, a provider of its proprietary Private Freight Marketplace (PFM) and TMS focused on accelerating productivity and increasing visibility for supply chain stakeholders, announced this week it closed a $20 million Series A financing, which brings the company’s total amount of investor-based funding to $50 million.

The round of financing was led by NewRoad Capital Partners and also included Greycroft, a venture capital firm based in Los Angeles and New York, and 9Yards Capital and others.

Emerge was established in early 2018 by Andrew Leto and Michael, siblings whose transportation roots run deep, as their father operated an air freight business, followed by their ownership of GlobalTranz, a full-service 3PL focused on freight brokerage and technology, whom was acquired earlier in 2018 by The Jordan Company, a private equity firm, for more than $400 million. 

The company’s freight logistics platform allows shippers to find reliable truck capacity at optimized shipping rates, according to Emerge officials. They added Emerge’s cloud-based rate platform is the first digital freight marketplace that connects shippers to direct carrier rates and that it is designed to reduce shipper operating costs by facilitating contract optimization and augmenting service from quote to delivery.

Within Emerge’s cloud-based PFM and TMS, the company is able to provide myriad services for truckload and less-than-truckload (LTL) shippers in various ways, including combining quoting and tendering, carrier management, real-time tracking, data-driven analytics, streamlined customer billing, and being able to connect and network with new players.  The company explained that providing true real-time visibility and access to all available capacity in the U.S. are chief objectives, with its PFM and TMS platform also including chat, analytics, history, and automated lane/repeat shipment creation.

“Emerge is a digital freight marketplace that serves as a procurement platform for domestic trucking,” said Andrew Leto, Emerge’s founder, in a statement. “The platform has been adopted by several Fortune 500 companies and hundreds of SMB organizations that rely on our technology to reduce freight spend, improve visibility and increase operational efficiencies. Many of them have achieved double-digit cost reduction on their transportation spend.”

Since its inception, Emerge has processed more than $1 billion in freight and 1500% annual growth from 2018 to 2019. The company pointed to various factors that drew new strategic investors, as well as retain incumbent investors, including: rapid growth, founder expertise, and its first of its kind software.

Emerge President Grant Crawford told LM in an interview that one key differentiator between Emerge and a crowded competitive market, all with a heavy technology focus, is that Emerge was built from the ground up by a team with deep freight transportation experience with a strong understanding of what shippers need and are looking for, too.

Addressing this round of funding, he explained that it will be focused on various efforts, including hiring and product development, among other things.

“It allows us to get a little more aggressive in all of those areas,” he said. “We have done a pretty good job, to date, in making sure we have proper balance that will allow us to do that and further build things out on out platform to operate on an even higher level from an automation standpoint. Right now, when someone goes into the [Emerge] marketplace and looks for capacity, we are giving them their first hit, on average, in six minutes and providing eight options for a certain lane. We want to do whatever we can do speed that up…and further the IT bandwidth and continue to add carriers.”

As for the Emerge carrier base, Crawford said it is currently at more than 31,000 carriers that are active on the Emerge platform, which is roughly double where it was a year ago at this time.  

In November 2018, Emerge raised $20 million in a seed round, which was led Greycroft, in addition to participation from other investors as well.