Boon raises $20.5 million to build agent AI tools for fleets

Logistics is the name of the game during the holiday season: Companies that can contract and get people and things to the right places on time are raking it in this time of year.

But behind this demand lies a great deal of inefficiency and fragmentation. Are logistics businesses ready for artificial intelligence to help them better manage their services? A starter called blessing he thinks the answer is yes. It’s now raised $20.5 million to prove it through a platform to better leverage data across different apps, improve operations, planning and overall efficiency.

“Think of Boo as a second employee in the back office,” founder and CEO Deepti Yenireddy said in an interview. “Our AI agent is like another teammate doing critical work so people can focus on tasks that actually make them more money.”

The funding comes from Marathon and Repoint, which backed it in a $15.5 million Series A round and a previously undisclosed $5 million seed round.

According to the study, there are more than 60 million car fleets in the world, if we take only freight carriers. Berg Insightthe vast majority of companies operating them are classified as SMEs.

At the same time, the tools they use are equally dispersed: accounting, routing, sales, HR – on average 15-20 different software and applications are used to manage a logistics or fleet company, all of which exist in silos surrounded by physical documents.

As Urvashi Barooah, lead investment partner for Redpoint Ventures, describes it, “first-generation point solution software tools added a heavy administrative burden to fleet management companies.”

Boon thinks he can increase efficiency in these systems tenfold with AI tools.

Focusing initially on revenue and operational workflows, the plan is to use the funding to expand the types of workflows it can cover — for example, to improve the performance of containers — to help build more efficient routes and find the best places to refuel. how to optimize loaded or staff.

Yenireddy said he came up with the idea for Boon while serving as chief product officer at fleet operations giant Samsara. “We know this client intimately from my past experience with Samsara’s leading product, telematics and international product,” he said. “These customers want one place and one platform. They do a lot and want simplicity in the technology they adopt. This is the reason and motivation for building it.”

He has experience as a founder, having founded an AI company in the HR sector, which he previously sold to Phenom People, an AI recruiting platform. So instead of thinking how he could build it within Samsara, he tried to build it as Boon. “Once a founder, always a founder,” said Yenireddy. He brought together alums from Apple, DoorDash, Google, Samsara and Shell to fuel his vision. (And now it’s actively recruiting for more go-to-market people and engineers.)

The funding comes amid some strong interests. Boon pays customers representing 35,000 drivers and 10,000 vehicles on its platform, and after nine months of operation, the company has reached $1 million in annual revenue.

This is just scratching the surface and there may be some bumps to go deeper. The actual work of building a platform that can intelligently work across various data silos to enhance enterprise intelligence has been a holy grail at the heart of other great (and highly funded) endeavors in the B2B world. Startups like H are trying to do the same in the “agent AI” arena. At the same time, if the implementation is really successful, they can lead to great efficiencies, but also raise questions about what people will do next as a result of this extra time.