Freight Hero has raised $5 million in seed funding to expand its artificial intelligence-powered service for managing freight brokers’ back-office operations. The round was led by Field Ventures, with participation from Flybridge Capital, Tip Top VC and Front Porch Venture Partners. The financing brings Freight Hero’s total funding to more than $6 million.
The company plans to use the capital to expand its sales and marketing efforts, grow its engineering and operations teams, and extend its service into adjacent functions such as billing, accounting and carrier sales.
Freight Hero combines AI agents with a dedicated team of human operators to perform operational work on behalf of freight brokerages. Rather than selling software that brokers must configure, implement and manage themselves, the company charges a flat fee per load and assumes responsibility for delivering the desired outcome.
The service manages the lifecycle of a shipment from rate confirmation through proof of delivery while working inside the systems that customers already use.
Freight Hero said its AI agents handle more than 90% of customer load interactions. Human operators, referred to by the company as Heroes, intervene when a situation requires judgment, context or direct communication.
These exceptions can include an upset driver requesting to speak with a person, inconsistent shipment data, missing documentation or another issue that cannot be resolved reliably through automation alone.
Freight brokerage involves coordinating shipments between companies that need to move goods and the carriers responsible for transporting them. Brokers may need to manage carrier selection, pricing, load tracking, documentation, communications and payment-related processes for every shipment.
While many of these tasks are repetitive, brokerage operations frequently involve unexpected events. A delayed truck, inaccurate status update, disputed charge or missing proof-of-delivery document may require immediate coordination among the broker, carrier, driver and customer.
Freight Hero was built around this combination of repeatable administrative work and unpredictable exceptions. Its model assigns routine interactions to AI systems while retaining human involvement for situations that require more nuanced decision-making.
The company is positioning itself within a category sometimes described as service-as-software or AI-native services. In this model, customers purchase completed work rather than licensing a software tool and remaining responsible for implementation, adoption and performance.
Freight Hero founder and CEO André Luis Martins Filho said traditional software providers may promise efficiency while transferring much of the execution risk to the customer. A brokerage may still need to integrate the product, train employees, redesign internal processes and ensure that workers use the technology consistently.
Freight Hero instead operates as an extension of the customer’s team. The company said this structure allows brokers to replace portions of their fixed labor expenses with variable costs tied to shipment volume.
The company is targeting a freight brokerage industry facing pressure from excess transportation capacity, lower spot-market rates and increasing expenses involving insurance, technology and labor.
Freight Hero described freight brokerage as a $19 billion market in which declining margins have become a significant challenge. Approximately 41% of freight brokers already use some form of AI or automation, according to Truckstop.com data cited by the company.
Freight Hero argues that technology adoption by itself has not solved the industry’s efficiency problems because many brokerages lack the resources or expertise required to convert software into measurable operational improvements.
By the end of July 2026, Freight Hero expects to have managed more than 50,000 loads and handled millions of communications with carriers.
The company said customers have improved service quality, converted fixed labor expenses into variable costs and are tracking toward returns on investment of more than 100%.
One of Freight Hero’s early customers is Ally Logistics, a fast-growing freight brokerage based in Michigan. Ally initially adopted Freight Hero to automate track-and-trace operations.
Track and trace involves monitoring a shipment’s progress and communicating with carriers and drivers to confirm pickup, location, delivery timing and completion. Although the task may sound straightforward, it can involve numerous manual calls, messages and data updates for each load.
Ally Logistics CEO Dan Manshaem said Freight Hero now handles the majority of interactions involving the company’s loads after rate confirmation.
Ally increased revenue by 82.4% year over year without meaningfully expanding its operations headcount. Manshaem identified Freight Hero as one of the technologies that helped support that growth.
The case illustrates Freight Hero’s broader value proposition. Rather than helping a brokerage automate a single task and leaving employees responsible for exceptions, the company manages the complete workflow through a combination of AI and human support.
Freight Hero plans to apply the same model to additional back-office functions. Billing and accounting expansion could help customers automate document collection, invoice preparation, payment reconciliation and other administrative processes.
Carrier sales could extend Freight Hero’s involvement into identifying and communicating with transportation providers capable of completing a shipment.
The company serves mid-market freight brokerages and is also backed by Dynamo Ventures, the AI Fund and other investors.
Field Ventures partner Jillian Williams said Freight Hero’s model is well suited to traditional industries with substantial labor spending but limited budgets for implementing and managing additional software.
Dynamo Ventures co-founder Ted Alling said Freight Hero has found a balance between automation and human relationships in an industry that cannot be fully managed by software alone.
KEY QUOTES:
“Everyone in this industry is selling AI as a technology product, and that’s the mistake. When you sell broker software and promise results, you’re handing them the responsibility to make it work.”
“ROI depends on implementation, adoption and change management, which are hard to get right. We do the opposite. Brokers pay a flat fee per load, and we run it end-to-end as an extension of their team. If it doesn’t run efficiently, that’s on us.”
André Luis Martins Filho, Founder and CEO of Freight Hero
“Traditional industries like freight brokerage don’t have large software budgets, but instead have enormous labor budgets. AI alone struggles to properly serve these markets because of the operational complexity.”
“Freight Hero reduces that friction by focusing on outcomes, doing the work for the customer rather than giving them a tool.”
Jillian Williams, Partner at Field Ventures
“Track and trace is one of the areas in brokerage operations with the most human touches and manual interventions. It’s very hard to automate due to the depth of nuance that exists in the process.”
“The results speak for themselves: they’re now fielding the vast majority of all touches on our loads post rate confirmation. We’ve grown our revenue by 82.4% year-over-year without meaningfully increasing operations headcount. Freight Hero was certainly one of the enablers of that.”
Dan Manshaem, CEO of Ally Logistics
“Freight brokerage was built on trust, on carriers and brokers who knew they could count on each other. Two decades of paperwork and tracking buried that trust.”
“Logistics is full of businesses too relational to fully automate, too heavy to run without help. Freight Hero is the first company to nail that balance.”
Ted Alling, Co-Founder of Dynamo Ventures and Early Investor in Freight Hero
