Mentium builds AI tools for brokers in the trucking industry. The trucking industry is made up of 3 major participants. There are trucks that transport products, companies that need their products transported, and brokers who match them. These brokers act as the connecting agent pre-shipment and handle payment post-shipment. Even slight changes in the route or delays in shipment result in debates about payment between the trucking company and the company. There are approximately 30,000 trucking brokers in the US[1] who deal with complicated payment reconciliation issues ranging up in the hundreds a day, all of which are done over email in varied forms.
Every shipment comes with several associated documents – bill of lading, invoice, purchase order, rate confirmation, proof of delivery, additional fees – parties involved need to reconcile documents they receive with those they send. To make matters worse, documents typically come through at different times and in different formats (e.g. PDF, excel, jpeg). This creates complexity for finance operations teams at brokers, carriers, and shippers alike.For brokers and carriers in particular, their ability to bring on new business is currently limited by their finance operations personnel – they simply cannot onboard more customers without adding finance operations headcount to handle payments, limiting gross margins. Mentium leverages LLMs to create order out of the vast amounts of unstructured payments data that logistics companies have to process.
We like to invest in AI application companies servicing forgotten verticals led by experienced founders. Aziz built a trucking company that scaled to $10 million in sales and has worked in Boston Consulting Group’s logistics team. Matthieu was a founding full-stack software engineer at Paragon and an AI software engineer at Brain Corp.
We are incredibly excited to partner with Aziz and Matthieu to build Mentium!
[1] Per the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (https://ai.fmcsa.dot.gov/registrationstatistics/customreports.aspx#OpAuthData)
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