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Automation platform Vooma announced Monday it has closed a $16.6 million funding round, consisting of $13 million in Series A funding led by Craft Ventures and a $3.6 million seed round led by Index Ventures with participation from industry angel investors. This investment highlights a growing recognition of AI’s potential to redefine freight brokerage operations by automating repetitive tasks and enhancing productivity. With freight market conditions set for recovery, Vooma’s solutions are also set to play a role in equipping brokers and carriers to meet increasing demand with precision.

Freight brokers often deal with an abundance of tasks that are time-intensive and prone to errors when done manually. Vooma addresses this challenge with its suite of AI-powered tools that streamline essential operations such as quote generation, load building and communication management.

For example, Vooma Quote automates email responses and tracks the outcomes of freight opportunities, saving brokers five minutes per quote on average, according to the company. Vooma Build also reduces manual order entry time by up to 10 minutes per load, automating 80% of the process and significantly improving scalability.

These innovations directly address one of the industry’s long-standing hurdles: integrating technology into a traditionally fragmented logistics ecosystem. Vooma’s multichannel AI agent interacts with emails, texts, calls and APIs, bridging gaps between disparate systems like TMS platforms and communication tools.

“Over the last 10 years there’s been a lot of investment in logistics technology, but true automation in workflows has been hard to achieve because of siloed point solutions and technology that wasn’t really able to codify the tribal knowledge and exceptions we often find in logistics or navigate the unstructured communication channels of emails, text and calls …,” Jesse Buckingham, co-founder of Vooma , told FreightWaves in an email. “AI agents can now overcome the obstacles prior technologies have faced in improving logistics.”

The timing of Vooma’s funding and growth trajectory aligns with an anticipated uptick in the freight market. After years of volatility due to economic uncertainties and global disruptions, the freight industry is seeing early signs of recovery. However, this recovery comes with challenges, including tighter capacity and heightened expectations for operational efficiency.

For freight brokers, this means the need to handle more transactions with fewer resources — a pressure point that Vooma’s automation tools work to alleviate. By minimizing the time spent on routine tasks, brokers can reallocate their energy toward strategic efforts, such as securing new business, optimizing carrier relationships and improving service quality. This ability to scale efficiently without compromising on service is critical in a competitive market.