Today, we announced a new $12.7M Series A investment into Parade led by Menlo Ventures. We could not be more excited to share what this means for our road ahead.
We founded Parade on the premise that freight would undergo rapid digital transformation and that we have to enable those who are at the center of this massive industry: the freight brokers. Freight brokers have been cast into the spotlight with new upstarts like Uber Freight & Convoy entering the freight brokerage market. In addition, the importance of freight brokers to the economy has been further underscored over the last two years due to the wild swings in supply chain disruptions and the challenges in finding available trucks.
Parade is enabling all freight brokers to grow their businesses online with its capacity management systems that manage the buying and selling truckload capacity. Our A.I.-driven workflows and freight partner networks have enabled our customers to find available trucks, automate bookings, and grow revenues. We believe modern tools and infrastructure empowers the freight brokerage workforce to gain efficiencies and grow business in an increasingly digital market landscape.
Our team continues to bring together the best minds from across freight tech and SaaS. Preet, Tony, and I founded Parade in 2015 with the mission to enable and connect the transportation industry. Over the past year, our team has more than doubled in size; our collective experiences (from companies like Convoy, Project44, KeepTruckin, Turvo, Uber, Google, Amazon) have grown our culture and amplified our passion for making freight better for our customers. We’ll continue to expand our team and culture in the months and years to come.
What can you expect from the Parade team in the coming months?
More Digital Freight
We’ve been building the infrastructure for digital bookings through rich application functionality and through our partnerships with the major TMS companies. We’ve seen digital transactions across Parade customers rise by over 500% year-over-year, and we expect this adoption trend to only accelerate.
We’ll continue to enrich these tools to help freight brokers manage even more complex relationships with their carriers, reimaging legacy constructs like waterfall tendering into new ways of managing capacity. These investments in innovation will continue to push the boundaries of digitalization for our customers.
Deepen Partner Capacity Connectivity
We’ve launched partnerships with leaders from across the industry to bring digitized truckload capacity to our freight broker customers – including DAT, KeepTruckin, Trucker Path, and Cloudtrucks. This has enabled brokers to tap into truckload capacity wherever carriers do business, and we’ll continue to welcome new partners that help us expand upon this.
We’ll also be working with our partners to innovate on digital-first communications between brokers and carriers, as we believe the entire industry will benefit from more streamlined and collaborative workflows between platforms.
Win More Business
We’re expanding our system’s capabilities to enable freight brokers to take a data-driven, capacity-first approach towards winning new business from their shipper customers. The spot and RFP processes of today are tediously manual and broken, and our innovation team is hard at work to simplify these important workflows.
We’re incredibly excited about our road ahead. A sincere thank you goes to our team, our early customers, and our investors who have believed in Parade and enabled us to reach this incredible milestone. We look forward to continuing to build the future of freight.
Anthony – CEO & Co-founder, Parade