The freight industry faces widespread challenges including fragmented business processes, razor-thin profit margins, and outdated technology. Mentium is working to transform how freight brokerage companies operate. The Austin-based startup announced this week that it has completed a $3.2 million seed funding round led by Lerer Hippeau, with participation from Matchstick Ventures, Tower Research Capital, Antler, MBA Ventures, and angel investor Michael Witte.

Mentium's platform leverages AI-powered "digital employees" to automate back-office manual tasks, promising to improve operational speed, reduce errors, and enhance business scalability.

Mentium CEO and co-founder Aziz Satarov says the company's founding concept stems from personal experience. Satarov worked in consulting for six years, primarily focusing on the logistics sector, before starting his own logistics company and experiencing firsthand the industry's inefficiencies and high operational costs. "Starting a business in freight is very difficult, with extremely low profit margins - only a few cents of profit per dollar of revenue," he explains. "After meeting Matthew, I realized we had the capability to solve these problems."

Co-founder and CTO Matthew Berger adds that logistics industry professionals urgently need technological solutions. "When you talk to people in the freight industry, you'll find they desperately want to leverage technology. Either their software is too outdated, or they can't easily access their own data - everywhere you look, there are problems waiting to be solved."

Satarov and Berger found that the freight industry's fragmentation manifests in two main ways. "First is technological fragmentation," Satarov notes. "Every company uses its own Transportation Management System (TMS), while carriers work with brokers using a mix of various systems. Second is process fragmentation: even between different clients, process standards vary, and back-office teams must remember all the rules. When you need to process business quickly in an environment with imperfect processes, the probability of errors increases significantly."

Mentium's AI agents offer flexibility, allowing users to automate workflows through plain text instructions without needing to write code for each scenario.

The technology development fully considers the limitations of traditional legacy systems. "Old systems often lack Application Programming Interfaces (APIs)," Berger explains. "We can directly access these systems' databases and use reverse engineering to retrofit them to work with the Mentium platform." Satarov emphasizes that the platform is designed specifically for environments where APIs aren't readily available, aiming to build "bridges" between different systems to unify data sources.

Mentium's first product focuses on accounts payable automation - a process that has traditionally required significant manual input, is error-prone, and can cause revenue loss. "This is one of the industry's most challenging problems," Satarov states. "Everyone knows AI excels at handling structured data, but the freight industry generates over 100,000 different invoice formats daily. We chose accounts payable automation as our breakthrough point not only because it's difficult, but because solving this problem brings the greatest value to the industry."

The platform integrates seamlessly with existing workflows, automatically capturing and processing invoices once embedded in email inboxes. "AI isn't meant to replace humans," Satarov says, "but to work collaboratively with them, making employees ten times more efficient without wasting energy on tedious, repetitive tasks."

Berger adds that exceptions can be handled in real-time: "When an exception occurs, you just need to quickly input instructions to immediately give the system new processing requirements."

Early application data shows the platform significantly improves efficiency. Customer feedback indicates that up to 70% of tasks can be completed without human intervention, not only reducing errors but also ensuring stable revenue. Platform deployment is relatively fast, though specific timelines depend on clients' existing systems.

Currently, Mentium has established strategic partnerships with Google, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and NVIDIA, helping the company scale while ensuring enterprise-grade service performance and compliance. Looking ahead, the company will prioritize customer-driven product development.

Regarding future development directions, Satarov states: "The most frequently asked question from customers is 'how to expand carrier resources.' The next feature we're developing is expanding carrier resources based on historical data. This functionality will help clients increase revenue, accelerate value realization, match freight orders faster, and reduce fraud risk."

Mentium plans to use this seed funding round to expand its engineering team, accelerate product development, and increase market share, striving to reshape the operational core systems of freight brokerage companies in the coming years.