FreightWaves secures $20 million in Series B funding from corporate and strategic investors

FreightWaves closes $20 million Series B funding round

FreightWaves, the leading provider of data and news for global freight markets, announced that it has successfully raised $20 million in a Series B financing round, bringing its total funding to nearly $40 million. The round was led by 8VC, the Silicon Valley venture capital firm that has participated in FreightWaves’ capital raises beginning with its seed round in late 2017 when the company began commercial operations.

“This round was entirely opportunistic and was initiated because we had a great deal of strategic interest from very important partners,” said Craig Fuller, founder and CEO of FreightWaves. “Our cash position was very healthy before the round, boosted by the growth of our operating cash flow due to the performance of the business over the past year. Our SONAR SaaS product continues to grow at monthly double-digit rates as clients experience the value of fast data and increasing visibility into the transportation and freight markets.”

The company will deploy the funds to expand data and transparency products beyond trucking to include global air, rail, maritime, port, and warehousing. FreightWaves combines fundamental data from hundreds of unique sources and creates machine learning-powered indices that are actionable for clients. FreightWaves SONAR offers unprecedented speed in terms of insight (most data is less than 24 hours old) and provides a market dashboard that includes technical charting, heat/geo maps, watchlists, and data visualization and modeling tools.

FreightWaves has 15 full-time data scientists and six PhDs on staff. Data comes from hundreds of sources, including transportation management systems, load boards, electronic logging device (ELD) providers, telematics, on-board truck data from original equipment manufacturers, trailer and container tracking and sensors, port schedules and management systems, payment companies, factoring companies, freight payment and auditing firms, fuel vendors and refineries, warehouse operators, trucking companies, third-party logistics providers (3PLs), shippers, airlines and air cargo data aggregators, IoT providers and messaging companies, weather forecasting services, DOT highway cameras, federal and state governments, social media and other sources.

FreightWaves has, or is working to develop, partnerships with the companies that are sources of data regarding the state of the global freight economy. The data is often “uncleansed and unstructured”; the data science and market expert team come together to develop sophisticated machine learning models that help interpret the data.

While the data comes from many sources, much of the data that FreightWaves publishes is proprietary. Over 93 percent of the more than 120,000 time-series indices published by FreightWaves can only be acquired through its proprietary SONAR platform.

The company is also not involved in matching freight, leaving that to many of its clients and partners. FreightWaves sells data and analytics to most of the digital freight brokers in the market, and to the largest 3PLs, trucking companies and shippers. To help mitigate freight market pricing volatility, FreightWaves is developing a financially settled Trucking Freight Futures contract that will be launched in late March 2019.