Announcing the Augment-8VC Partnership

Earlier this year, we led Augment’s $25 million seed round, our second time backing Harish Abbott (CEO) and Art Rivilis (CTO). The momentum around Augment is unmistakable, as they demonstrate how AI will reshape the logistics industry—and announce their Series A funding round.

Repeat entrepreneurs are a pillar of our portfolio, and Harish and Art have been two of the foremost. We met Harish in 2017, as he was exploring his next venture, and realized we were both working on uncannily similar ideas. As we began refining them together, we developed immediate conviction in Harish, and soon led a large seed round in his new company, Deliverr. 

Harish conceived Deliverr to bring the Prime experience beyond Amazon, solving complex colocation problems with just-in-time efficiency. Deliverr went on to power billions of dollars in ecommerce for major channels like Walmart.com, and in 2022 exited to Shopify for $2.1 billion. This established Deliverr as a proofpoint for our strategy, and affirmed Harish’s ability to build category-defining companies. There is no one we trust more implicitly to build in logistics.

With the LLM age underway, Harish & Art knew logistics was primed for transformation. Historically, logistics has suffered from fragmented systems, busywork, and slow software adoption. But these same barriers create a massive opportunity to close the innovation gap, and address extensive spending on menial tasks that can now be automated. This converged with our thesis that AI-driven application software is the defining product geometry of this new era—and logistics provides a rich, real-world proving ground.

In venture investing, “Why now?” is a critical question, but “Who?” is equally important. AI provided the fuel; Harish and Art provided the spark. With former 8VC advisor Justin Hall joining them as CCO, our conviction only deepened. The result is Augment and their flagship product, Augie, the AI teammate for logistics operators. Augment emerged from stealth in March, and today announced their $85M Series A, led by Redpoint.

Augment is already working with some of the top names in trucking and freight brokerage. In just a few months, customers have realized such benefits as:

• $1 million + in track and trace payroll savings at a single firm
• 40% fewer invoice delays
• Up to 8-day acceleration in billing cycles
• 5% of gross margin recovery per load 

These numbers hint at the realization behind Augment. The productivity opportunity in US logistics is estimated at $80B annually, but between the downstream effects of poor utilization, delays, and rework, waste accounts for $320B, approximately 10% of the $3.2 trillion US logistics market. It makes sense: logistics is about movement, and wasted motion is among the most insidious waste. Digging into that waste reveals why logistics needs a teammate, not a simple co-pilot.

Operations managers are the fulcrum of the freight industry. Their days are a maze of emails, calls, voicemails, disconnected portals, documents, and spreadsheets. Every truckload, delivery, even individual freight item necessitates dozens of actions. Because trucks run 24/7, these managers can never rest. With 200,000 shippers, 900,000 trucking companies, and 20,000 trucking brokerages in the US alone, those discrete challenges add up to vast waste—and an opportunity to redefine American efficiency.

Augie exists to alleviate this burden, and already tackles major workflows for freight brokers and carriers: collecting documents for invoicing, end-to-end tracking of loads, building load tenders, taking carrier calls, emails, driver support, and fleet management. Augie is built for asynchronous task delegation, with a dazzling range of skills: reading and writing, managing email, making and receiving calls, accessing systems of record, data entry, and document uploads. 

One inherent tension is that AI is non-deterministic, and thrives on ambiguity, while logistics is highly deterministic, and demands precision. To reconcile them, Augment has built a deep, domain-specific ontology, mapping the complex relationships between loads, documents, carriers, shippers, and people. Each workflow encodes data structures, permissions, and edge-case reasoning, enabling Augie to determine what’s reasonable, risky, or anomalous. This echoes Licklider’s concept of man-machine symbiosis, which was foundational to the Palantir and Addepar playbooks. Humans provide the expertise and context, allowing AI to capture real value and continuous learnings.  

Across departments, end-to-end automation will allow operators to focus on higher-margin activities. Today, Augment is focused on operations and back-office functions, and will soon expand to sales, where opportunities abound to optimize pricing, coordinate contracts, and strengthen customer relationships. Owning these agentic workflows will create opportunities to develop and own additional infrastructure in turn. Building alongside the biggest freight brokers, Augment is laying the foundation to unify shippers, brokers, and carriers through cross-channel AI, resulting in faster shipments, fewer errors, and ultimately, new standards of delivery.

Augment’s new funding is concentrated on hiring exceptional contributors across engineering, GTM, and more. If you’re inspired to build a dramatically more efficient and human-centered supply chain, apply today.

Almost eight years into our partnership, the moment feels both full circle and radically new. We could not be more excited to renew our work with Harish and Art, and support their expansive vision for an all-important industry.