GoFreight, a Los Angeles-based provider of cloud-based software for the freight forwarding industry, recently announced it raised $23 million through a Series A funding round.
Flex Capital and Headline led the fundraise, with participation from FX Venture Partners, Palm Drive Capital, Mucker Capital, Cornerstone Ventures and Red Building Capital.
GoFreight CEO Trenton Chen said the infusion of cash will go toward expanding the company’s workforce and product offerings.
“We will continue to invest heavily towards improving our product primed for driving our customers’ success,” Chen told FreightWaves. “We consider ourselves not only customer focused but customer obsessed. We’re driven to solve real-world problems of small and medium-sized freight forwarding companies through our cloud-based solution.”
GoFreight’s software helps freight forwarders manage the transportation of goods via ocean, air, and land routes with features tailored to freight forwarding.
Tom Gieselmann, a partner at Headline, said it was attracted to GoFreight’s one-stop solution capabilities.
“GoFreight’s all-in-one software provides greater transparency to freight movement, allowing freight forwarders to better manage their business … end to end,” Gieselmann said in a news release. “This versatility makes the product incredibly impactful, and a big reason behind why we’ve identified them as one of the most promising logistics tech companies on the market.”
GoFreight was co-founded in 2017 by Chen and Alex Chang, the company’s sales director. Chen said he got the idea for GoFreight after meeting freight professionals who were “struggling to find the right TMS and other software solutions.”
Prior to founding GoFreight, Chen worked at mobile payments platform Smart Catch International Co. and the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC).
“After leaving my position with TSMC, I discussed this observation with co-founder Alex, who at the time was the vice president of his family’s importation business,” Chen said. “He was also very familiar with this struggle, from his interaction with various forwarders, demonstrating the impact and ubiquity of this challenge across the forwarding industry. This captured my imagination, leading us to spend the next three months intermingling with these forwarders to fully capture the nature and extent of their software challenges and needs.”
GoFreight aims to be a TMS for small and midsized freight forwarders. The software helps freight forwarders track shipments with real-time carrier visibility, EDI-integrated container-tracking, and integrated payment processing and accounting solutions.
Shippers can also use the GoFreight app to send inquiries, make bookings, track shipments, make payments and run reports on the customer-facing portal.
GoFreight currently offers visibility on over 125 ocean, air and rail carriers as well as 45 U.S. terminals. The company’s pricing model for freight forwarders charges by seats for basic functions, Chen said.
“Beyond that, we also offer volume-based services that include a variety of features such as security filing, freight forwarder-centric visibility, customer-facing portal and purchase order management,” Chen said.
Chen said GoFreight expects the freight market to slow down in the first quarter of the year but pick up steam as 2023 continues.
“We foresee the supply chain demand to continue to remain low until Q2,” Chen said. “We have witnessed many medium- and large-sized freight forwarders actively seeking modern software in order to stay competitive in the near future. Essentially, the current downtime is the best season for freight forwarders to transition from legacy TMS towards adopting cloud-based solutions since they are less busy, which is very rare for a freight forwarder.”
| Funding details | GoFreight |
| Funding amount | $23 million |
| Funding round | Series A |
| Lead investors | Flex Capital and Headline |
| Other investors | FX Venture Partners, Palm Drive Capital, Mucker Capital, Cornerstone Ventures and Red Building Capital |
| Goal for the round | Funding will help company accelerate product road map, expand workforce |
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