In the United States, much of commerce relies on moving goods on trucks to market. The way it works is a manufacturer calls a shipping broker with instructions like 'I need to get a load of beer to Dallas by Friday.' They agree on a price and the broker finds a trucker to deliver the goods. The financials can get complicated, and much of the work is still done by fax, phone and in spreadsheets.

Mvmnt is trying to bring some more sophisticated technology to bear on the process, while providing a full set of freight brokerage services. Today, the Chicago-based startup announced a $20 million Series A.

“We’re what's called a Transportation Management System (TMS).You could just think about that as enterprise software for managing freight, and so when I say freight, we're talking about domestic truckloads,” CEO and founder Michael Colin explained. The freight broker’s job is to negotiate a price with the shipper and then one with the trucker, both at a price point that allows them to make a profit as the party in the middle.

He says the TMS itself is not unique. There are other companies that have produced on-prem and cloud versions of this kind of software software. What makes him different, and what attracted top shelf investors to this midwest company, is providing what he calls a “brokerage in a box.”

“Ultimately what we do is provide not just industry parity software, but we also use that as a kind of distribution vehicle for other business services like freight factoring, financial services, insurance, phones, surety bonds – the idea is that we can take the entirety of this brokerage-in-a-box solution and distribute that to the long tail of this market,” he said.

Mvmnt transportation management system Image Credits: Mvmnt

In fact, the company is giving away the TMS software to brokerage companies, believing that the real money is in providing these other services, especially dealing with the financials and making sure everyone gets paid.