Augment raises $85M to automate freight work with AI

Augment raises $85M to automate freight busywork with AI

Harish Abbott, who sold Deliverr to Shopify for $2.1 billion, is back in logistics with Augment and its AI assistant Augie. The startup announced an $85 million Series A led by Redpoint five months after a $25 million seed, signaling strong investor confidence in automation for freight operations.

Augie targets the tedious, manual work that defines day-to-day freight: chasing emails, compiling bids, tracking loads, and collecting invoices. By operating across voice, email, Slack, SMS and Telegram, Augie acts like a virtual operations assistant that frees teams to focus on negotiations and relationships.

Today Augie performs seven core tasks that usually demand repeated human touchpoints. That single-minded focus on operational bottlenecks is translating to measurable results for customers already fully onboarded.

• Gathering and reviewing pricing bids from carriers
• Tracking shipments en route and surfacing exceptions
• Building consolidated loads to maximize truck space
• Collecting and validating invoicing documents to cut billing delays
• Streamlining multi-channel communications across phone, text, and messaging apps

Augment isn't disclosing revenue, but it says the customer base more than doubled since the seed round. Fully onboarded clients like Armstrong Transport Group report results such as a 40% reduction in invoice delays — a concrete productivity win that investors cited when betting on the company.

Abbott emphasizes why the company needs engineering muscle: freight systems are fragmented, archaic, and highly siloed. Augment plans to hire 50 engineers to build connectors and add features as it expands beyond trucking into international shipping and other logistics verticals.

Competition is heating up. Startups like Vooma and FleetWorks are pursuing similar automation plays, while incumbents such as FedEx and UPS are investing in proprietary AI. Yet Augment’s early traction suggests customers value a product that can reason across channels and act like a human assistant.

Why this matters and how companies should react

The real story is not just automation, it's orchestration: automating repetitive touchpoints while ensuring data flows across legacy TMS, carrier portals, and accounting systems. That requires more than a chatbot — it requires mapping workflows, securing data handoffs, and proving ROI in months not years.

For logistics leaders asking where to start: prioritize processes with high volume and measurable KPIs (invoice cycle time, detention claims, or booking speed). Expect integration work to dominate early engineering efforts and budget for connectors to EDI, APIs, email parsing and message channels.

QuarkyByte’s approach is to quantify where automation will move the needle, design integration blueprints that limit disruption, and pilot with clear success metrics. That kind of analytical, outcome-driven playbook is how operators capture the value Augie promises without breaking existing operations.

Augment’s $85M raise accelerates a shift we've long expected: AI will take on the coordination chores of logistics first, then expand into higher-value planning tasks. The winners will be companies that pair product-first AI like Augie with disciplined integration and measurement — a combination that turns time saved into real margin improvement.