Curri nabs $6M for AI-powered last-mile construction logistics

Curri, a Y Combinator-backed logistics startup delivering construction supplies and materials, today announced the closing of a $6 million funding round. The company says the proceeds will be used to expand its services as well as its market reach.

Last-mile delivery logistics tends to be the most expensive and time-consuming part of the shipping process. According to one estimate, last-mile accounts for 53% of total shipping costs and 41% of total supply chain costs. With the rise of ecommerce in the U.S., retail providers are increasingly focusing on fulfilment and distribution at the lowest cost. Particularly in the construction industry, the pandemic continues to disrupt wholesalers, highlighting the need for flexible and reliable delivery.

Curri claims to solve this problem in construction with an “Uber-like” last-mile delivery model. The company makes available to customers a fleet of drivers with trucks, flatbeds, cars, and other vehicles who can deliver items like pipe bundles, water heaters, and lumber. Curri users arrange an order, open the Curri app, and enter pickup and dropoff locations to book the service. Curri’s drivers then pick up the supplies and ensure the order is correct before fulfilling the delivery.

Curri offers live updates via the app to let customers follow and share the status of their deliveries. It also provides proof-of-delivery signature and photos for tracking, regulatory, and compliance purposes.

Curri competes with a number of startups in a last-mile delivery market that’s anticipated to reach $66 billion by 2026, including Bond, Bringg, Onfleet, DispatchTrack, and Deliverr. But Curri claims its secret sauce is something that cofounder and CEO Matthew Lafferty calls “elastic scale.” Basically, it’s a concept where customers only pay for what they need. While traditional fleets can underutilize trucks or idle drivers as they wait for orders to come in, Curri says it delivers loads faster thanks to a deep layer of predictive machine learning.

According to Lafferty, thousands of customers use Curri to deliver shipments throughout the U.S. “Suppliers who don’t have the ability to make urgent, on-demand, or long distance deliveries are leaving sales on the table and risk losing customers and business to suppliers who do,” he said in a press release. “Fleet augmentation is the secret weapon of suppliers who care about getting material in their customer’s hands, fast.”

Los Angeles, California-based Curri’s series A funding announced today included participation from existing backer Initialized Capital in addition to new investor Rainfall Ventures. It brings four-year-old Curri’s total raised to date to nearly $7 million following a $150,000 seed round in August 2019.