Portex, a San Francisco, CA-based tool where shippers can handle everything related to freight management in one place, raised $6.25m in seed funding.
The round was led by Footwork and joined by Cowboy Ventures. Existing investors Susa Ventures and Base 10 also participated in the round.
The company will use the new funding to accelerate its AI-focused product development and go-to-market.
The funding round comes as the startup approaches nearly $100 million in annualized freight transport bookings across its rapidly growing, global customer base of small- to mid-sized companies.
Led by founder and chief executive officer Brittany Ennix, Portex provides a cloud-based software platform that allows small- to mid-sized companies to centralize communication across their broker and forwarder partners with instant messaging, as well as to manage freight bids and quotes, shipment status, and carrier performance. Importantly, Portex is broker-agnostic, empowering shippers to work with as many brokers or carriers as makes sense for their pricing and service needs.
Customers include Armorock, Franklin Foods, and Community Coffee.
Looking ahead, Portex will roll out a suite of AI-powered features to make freight management more automated and strategic. Its modern backend and structured data make the platform ideally suited to use AI to make everything from pricing suggestions, to benchmarking, and analytics faster and more intelligent.
For example, companies on it will soon be able to use conversational prompts to generate tailored analytics reports. Portex will also be able to suggest carrier selections to customers based on factors like performance, route, ship time, and/or cost.
The company will also add other key functionality like invoice reconciliation and payments in the coming months.
FinSMEs
05/09/2024