Cargomatic picks up $35 million

The freight-matching tech firm plans to use funding to expand geographically and hire more employees.    Cargomatic, a Los Angeles-based freight-matching technology firm, has garnered $35 million in a Series B funding round, led by private equity firm Warburg Pincus.
   Canaan, Genesee & Wyoming, Xplorer Capital and Muse Family Enterprises also participated in the funding round, Warburg Pincus said.
   Cargomatic, which focuses on the fragmented short-haul and drayage trucking markets, said it plans to use the funding to expand geographically and hire more employees. Its mobile application connects shippers, receivers and carriers and enables customers to track information in real time, quickly access or list untapped trucking capacity within the market, improve service levels and manage outsourced vendors within one platform.
   Founded in 2013, Cargomatic officially launched in 2014, starting in the Southern California market before expanding into the New York City metro area the following year.
   Cargomatic raised $8 million in Series A funding in 2015. It said then that it planned to use the funding to expand service to other transportation hubs around the country, improve the platform’s user experience and hire more employees.
   However, the company was struggling two years ago and laid off more than one-third of its staff, according to The Wall Street Journal. New business came in so quickly the company “didn’t have downtime to sit down and build a product for commercial scale,” Hrach Simonian, a general partner at Canaan and a member of Cargomatic’s board, explained.
   After Richard Gerstein became Cargomatic’s CEO in early 2017, he shrank headcount, brought on more people with transportation experience and redirected the technology toward big shippers that use transportation management software instead of booking freight on their smartphones, The Wall Street Journal said. “We’re doing dramatically more business,” Gerstein said. “We’re doing about eight to 10 times the volume we were.”
   Cargomatic now operates in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, Florida, Seattle, Dallas, Houston and New York, with thousands of trading partners using its platform, including shippers, manufacturers, retailers and third-party logistics providers.