Today we announce a new €1.3M Seed investment into Meight and the beginning of a new journey that we wanted to share with you.
Led by Faber Ventures, this funding round was also joined by the grupo Lusiaves SGPS, the Munich-based Supelyst VC, the European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT) and a strategic syndicate of experienced Business Angels in Road Transportation and Freight Forwarding, such as Ryan Petersen, the Unbabel founders and Dispatch VC.
To begin with, we founded Meight on the premise that road transport efficiencies are gravely misunderstood. There is an absolute lack of knowledge of what is happening on the road and the impact that hidden inefficiencies have on citizens, businesses and society. There is no sense of how much the global economy and its cost of goods depend on road transport and, most importantly, how harmful its green-house gas emissions are to the world.
So we set out to solve this global problem, connecting physical moving trucks to the digital world and applying first principles to learn about movement, its energy and its complexity. In a nutshell, we set out to unveil motion’s hidden secrets, using data, engineering and technology.
Motion can be described in eight physical dimensions. Our name, Meight, captures our obsession with understanding motion through data, but also our role in fostering collaboration.
Transport plays a fundamental role. Every day, tons of freight are delivered by road, air and sea. Road transport is now a $5 Trillion industry, almost every good is delivered by a truck. Road transport moves 16 billion ton-km of goods and it will triple in the next 30 years. That’s 100 million trucks to fulfil the needs and dreams of the human race.
There is a cost to all of this, not least monetary, but also at a societal and environmental level. Unit economics are strained, a third of what we spend on products goes to transport. Even if trucks account for only 2% of road vehicles, they are responsible for 22% of road green-house gas emissions, making trucks one of the biggest pollutants in the world.
Road Freight still runs offline — only 35% of trucks are connected worldwide. Current systems are opaque by default, causing much distraction and cost.
Meight has developed a, patent published, technology capable of understanding where energy consumption comes from, forecast and reduce it. It is the only technology capable of, de facto, pinpoint inefficiencies at the most granular level (each journey), forecast those and help Drivers in changing their behaviour.
Although the technology requires substantial amounts of data to be developed, it can be used on any smartphone. Therefore, not requiring any truck installation or retrofit, which is a substantial effort and expense for Carriers. We’re leveraging all this data to create the first road freight platform, enabling the next generation of services, where supply chain stakeholders and service providers can easily connect to.
Single Driver App — connected to the supply chain.
Carriers face serious challenges when adopting new technologies, suffering long and costly implementations due to the complexity inherent in processes and absence of communication between service providers. Drivers, the main workforce of the carriers, have no technology to help them, despite having the potential to drastically change operational efficiency.
Meight App allows carriers to finally connect to the supply chain, by digitising all journeys and drastically improving operational efficiency through driver actions. Drivers are coached on how to improve their driving efficiency all the while journeys become fully available to the entire supply chain. Meight App is a solution that carriers can effortlessly implement to extract more value from a driver while offloading work.
The carrier infrastructure on the internet.
Road transportation has seen rapid change and increasing complexity, resulting in new carrier requirements that are not being satisfied. The current approach is to throw custom applications and dashboards to solve each problem individually while carriers struggle to make them work together. Consequently, small and mid-sized carriers are self-financing the development of custom tools that end up producing very poor, high maintenance, disconnected and unscalable softwares applications.
Meight API is the gateway for the carrier infrastructure to the internet, where all services, both internal and external, can coexist and grow in a sustainable manner. Rather than throwing yet another technology solution to the carrier, Meight API creates clear abstractions on Carriers’ most important resources and actions, allowing all service providers to interact with them.
By leveraging expertise from each system, carriers can grow operations at their preferred pace, without the need for long, costly implementation processes and fear of vendor lock-in, knowing they are investing on top of an open platform. Meight API is open to developers, so that a community around Transport Digitisation can grow and become self-sufficient.
We’re on a mission to learn about movement to help drivers, businesses and citizens spend less and use less, creating a future where every journey has a positive impact on the world.
We intend to lead the transformation of this sector, with positive loops to the global economy and the environment, by building the best technology and working closely with our stakeholders, because we cannot change transportation alone!
With 20 Million kilometres in their log, Meight technology can already be used in 75% of the truck brands in Europe. Which will prove crucial for the company expansion to the European logistics hubs, located in Germany-BENELUX, France and Spain.
“At Meight we believe journey by journey, carriers and drivers can spend less and use less. Meight brings technology to an old industry that lacks the resources and know-how to fully embrace the new digital era. Professional drivers will not disappear, autonomous driving is not the silver bullet to a complex industry and we need to find alternatives to boost one of the most fascinating, with the biggest impact, contributors to world trade.”
— Luis Mendes
Stay in touch with us via, registering to our Newsletter (in Meight.com) and following us on Twitter