In a business traditionally dominated by the manual processes of freight brokers, digital freight matching seeks to squeeze out longstanding inefficiencies and hidden fees. It is a supply-chain technology that is fairly new and will potentially change the broker-carrier relationship.
Stakh Vozniak, the CEO and co-founder of the Ukrainian startup Cargofy, hopes to play a key role in this evolving technology in the USA.
Vozniak is no stranger to shipping and logistics. In 2009, at the age of 18, the serial entrepreneur founded Wozward, a company that specializes in road freight transport offering a wide range of freight forwarding and warehousing services.
In 2014 he set up Tona, an early version of Cargofy, which helps consumers find the right transport and driver for their personal delivery needs. In 2016, Vozniak launched Cargofy, which utilizes AI to simplify the shipping process for all types of cargo both large and small.
“Cargofy is a virtual assistant service, kind of a ‘Siri’ but for truck drivers. We help truckers get access to high paying loads through our mobile app, twenty-four hours a day and seven days per week, “ says Vozniak. In addition to Vozniak, the company has two other founders: Alex Kovalchuk, CTO, and Dimitris Alexious, CMO.
Cargofy’s 2016 participation in an Israeli transportation accelerator Capsula.Studio helped the company to see opportunities beyond Ukraine. “I was focused only on Ukraine and this program helped us to create a global strategy and scale our product,” said Vozniak.
In 2017, the Cargofy CEO applied to three business accelerator programs and was accepted by the Iowa Startup Accelerator, which led to their expansion in the U.S. Today, the company is incorporated in the USA and has an office in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, but still maintains its R&D center in Kyiv. It operates commercially in Ukraine, Estonia and India, in addition to the US.
In the last year, Cargofy’s US business has grown to $2.7 million in revenue. Its early success earned it a significant place in the 2018 Inc. 5000 list of the fastest growing companies in the USA. It is cited as the 2nd fastest growing company in Iowa.
Since the founding of Cargofy, the tech entrepreneur has “bootstrapped” the growth of his company with earnings from his early ventures. He intends to use its current profits to continue developing his AI app technology to make it even more efficient and useful for truckers and major corporations to connect with each other.
Cargofy charges truckers a 5% commission for each load secured through its app. The company gets about 30,000 loads daily on its platform and has more than 400 owner-operator truckers using its smartphone app.
While there are several competitors in digital freight matching, the CEO points out the major advantages of the Cargofy solution. “We are a virtual AI-powered assistant that finds loads for the truck driver at any hour of the day without any human involvement. We focus only on owner-operators and their needs. And the most important thing: we’ve already proven our hypothesis works,” Vozniak says.
