Parade nabs $12.7M to match up shipments with transportation

Freight-matching services, which pair shippers to freight carriers like trucks and vans, are attracting growing investment. Despite a slow initial uptake -- in a 2018 FreightWaves survey, carriers that use freight-matching services said that they only sourced 11% of their freight from the services -- they've become a larger source of business as the pandemic encourages companies to invest in digital supply chain solutions. Flock Freight, Loadsmart, Next Trucking, and Convoy have raised hundreds of millions of dollars to grow their networks to hundreds of thousands of trucks. While the freight-matching sector is becoming increasingly competitive, new startups with novel approaches -- or what they claim are novel approaches -- are emerging to take on incumbents. Among the newcomers is Parade, which leverages AI-powered technology to help find matches of freight load, route, equipment type, and a carrier's (i.e., shipper's) on-time reliability.