Loop raised $24M to cut freight invoice lag from 50 days to 3

Loop sits between logistics and payments, digitizing freight invoices for shippers, carriers and brokers on a consumption-based fee.

An API layer that digitizes freight documents and reconciles payments can clear invoices in near real-time and cut invoice errors to near zero.

$6M seed co-led by Susa Ventures and 8VC; $24M Series A led by Founders Fund, with Uber co-founders Garrett Camp (Expa) and Ryan Graves (Saltwater Capital) and Flexport founder Ryan Petersen investing.

Uber data science manager Matt McKinney and engineer Shaosu Liu helped launch Uber Freight, then heard 'it's hard to get paid and hard to pay' verbatim across 35 interviews with shippers, carriers and brokers — and built the prototype on nights and weekends before leaving Uber in May 2021.

Three of the 35 companies interviewed committed to test the prototype as first customers. The product launched in March 2022 using natural language processing and computer vision to extract and validate invoice data, promising near real-time clearing and near-0% error rates, with over $1 billion in total payment volume by November and 35 employees, more than 10 from Uber.

Freight invoicing is fragmented and error-prone — 20% error rates and 50-day payment lags were visible even at Uber's scale.

Small carriers lack Uber's 250 engineers, so the same billing pain persists across the long tail of the industry.

COVID pushed payments from paper to electronic, and supply-chain cost surges made shippers hunt for savings.

Consumption pricing ties Loop's revenue to the value it clears, inverting the enterprise-software sales pitch.

When 35 interviewees describe the same pain verbatim, that is product validation before the product — and the giant's problem is every smaller player's problem too.

As of November 3, 2022, Loop had 35 employees, over $1 billion in cumulative payment volume, and a $24 million Series A to grow its document-ingestion and reconciliation APIs.