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Europe may have produced some of freight tech’s most ambitious start-ups, but building them into global giants remains a difficult challenge.
For David Nothacker, chief executive of German digital forwarding platform Sennder, the issue is not a lack of ideas, founders, or early-stage capital. It is what happens when those companies need to scale.
“I would differentiate a little bit between early-stage… and growth-stage capital,” he told Лодстар. “On the early-stage side, Europe still offers very attractive opportunities for young founders.”
But once companies reach Series B or C, he said, “capital becomes more difficult to access”, largely because there are “very few European funds that invest into growth”.
That forces many European freight-tech companies to look across the Atlantic. And in a tougher funding environment, US investors often have a simpler choice.
“When American funds have an option to invest into a US company and a European company in a difficult market environment… there is a tendency to allocate capital more to the US firms,” said Mr Nothacker.
The reason, he argued, is not simply national bias. It is also the exit environment. US tech companies currently offer clearer paths to IPO or other liquidity events, making it easier for investors to see how and when they might get their money back.
“In Europe, we’re missing capital for growth companies,” he said.
Freight tech is not a cheap market in which to scale. Logistics is operationally complex, geographically fragmented, and often slow to adopt new systems. Unlike pure software, digital freight businesses frequently need people, local relationships, carrier networks, and working capital, as well as technology.
Sennder itself has reached significant scale, following its acquisition of CH Robinson’s European surface transportation business, which saw its revenues rise from about €700m to some €1.4bn now. Mr Nothacker says the business is not currently raising equity. The focus instead, he said, was on working capital optimisation.
But his comments point to a broader problem for Europe’s digital logistics sector. During the Covid-era boom, cheap capital helped fuel excitement around digital freight models. That period has now ended.
“Digital models were benefiting from the cheap capital,” he said. “That changed over time… capital is more expensive.”
The result is a market in which investors now expect a much clearer link between what companies spend and what they get back. “Now we live in a reality where the capital allocation is much more mindful,” Mr Nothacker said.
That shift is being felt across the sector.
FreightSuite, a UK start-up building an AI-native alternative to CargoWise, has raised about $4.6m and is preparing a Series A round. Its founders have also been spending time in Austin, Texas, citing interest from both US customers and venture capital.
Beacon, which began life as a digital forwarder before pivoting into a pure software and data platform, has also looked to US capital. CEO Fraser Robinson said its lead investor, 8VC, is based in Texas, adding that many San Francisco investors relocated to Austin during Covid, creating a growing tech investment ecosystem there.
Mr Robinson, who has raised capital in both the US and Europe, said the UK and Europe were “definitely more difficult”, although he stressed there were still strong investors locally. The issue, he said, was that, beyond a relatively tight group of specialist venture investors, the ecosystem “tails off pretty quickly”.
For Mr Nothacker, the funding gap is only one part of the problem. Europe itself is harder to scale.
A US logistics start-up can often grow in one large market, with one language, one broad commercial culture, and a more unified customer base. Europe is different: freight remains highly national, relationship-driven, and operationally local.
“A French customer wants to have a French point of contact, and a Polish carrier wants to have a Polish point of contact,” he said. “In the US, it’s much easier.”
That fragmentation affects everything: go-to-market strategy; account management; carrier onboarding; and customer adoption. It also means companies often need to customise their model country by country, adding cost and slowing expansion.
This, Mr Nothacker argued, helped explain why European freight-tech markets often produce fewer scaled winners. In the US, investors may be willing to back second, third or fourth players in a category if they believe the model has been validated. In Europe, he said, once one company has raised heavily, rivals are often asked how they can compete with the best-funded player.
“You need to be ahead of the curve in Europe,” he said. “In the US, you can be number three, four, five, and certainly have good access to capital.”
The difficulty is compounded by the nature of logistics itself. Many digital freight start-ups discovered that product-market fit was harder than expected. Companies that began with pure software sometimes found that customers did not use the product in daily operations, while others narrowed their focus to specific use cases, making them harder to scale.
Technology adoption, Mr Nothacker said, remained one of the biggest barriers in road freight. Sennder initially thought customers and carriers would shift more naturally towards apps and digital workflows. Instead, it found that many still preferred phone calls and emails until the company had enough volume and relevance to make platform adoption worthwhile.
Scale gives companies the data needed to optimise pricing and capacity, as well as the commercial weight to change behaviour.
The broader conclusion is uncomfortable for European freight tech. The region has the founders, the problems, and the customers. What it lacks is the combination of deep growth capital, unified markets, and exit pathways that allow companies to scale at US speed.
The irony is that the opportunity remains large. AI, automation, and data-driven logistics are now central to the future of forwarding, brokerage, and transport management. But turning those ideas into global companies may require more than better software.
It may require Europe to solve its scaling problem first.