The freight industry is full of fragmented workflows, thin margins and outdated technology. Mentium is aiming to change the way freight brokerages operate. The Austin-based startup announced a $3.2 million seed round this week, 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 workers" to automate manual back-office tasks, promising faster operations, fewer errors, and greater scalability.
The concept for Mentium was born out of personal experience, says CEO and co-founder Aziz Satarov. After six years in consulting, focused primarily on logistics, Satarov launched his own logistics company and encountered the inefficiencies and high operational costs firsthand. "It's a challenging business to build. Margins are so low, cents on the dollar," he explains. "When I met Matthieu, I realized we had the solutions to these problems."
Matthieu Berger, co-founder and CTO, adds that logistics professionals are eager for technology solutions. "When you talk to freight people, they're craving technology. Software is outdated, or they can't access their data. Everywhere you look, there's a problem to solve."
Satarov and Berger saw that the industry was split into two main points of fragmentation. "The first is technology," Satarov says. "Everyone uses their own TMS, and carriers use a mix of all through their partnerships with brokerages. The second is business process fragmentation. Even between customers, processes differ. Back-office teams have to remember all the rules. When you have to process quickly with poor processes, you're likely to make more mistakes."
Mentium's AI agents offer flexibility, allowing users to automate workflows in plain text rather than coding each scenario.
The technology itself is built to work around the limitations of legacy systems. "Old systems don't always have APIs," Berger explains. "We can access databases directly and retro-engineer them to accommodate Mentium." Satarov emphasizes that the platform is designed for environments where APIs aren't always available, building the "bridge" between disparate systems to create a single source of truth.
Mentium's first product focus is accounts payable automation, a historically labor-intensive process prone to errors and revenue leakage. "This was the most challenging problem," Satarov says. "If you think about AI, it's great with structured data. But freight invoices come in over 100,000 formats each day. The biggest push on accounts payable was not just the challenge, it's also where we can make the biggest impact."