No human needed: Cargofy’s AI takes the wheel in logistics

By Stakh Vozniak, CEO at Forward Group

In 2017, I was texting truckers about delivering apples to a juice factory. Today, our AI agents are closing cargo deals without a single human in the loop.

We started with a simple idea: to help carriers find cargo, and to help shippers find trucks. That’s how Cargofy and Cargohub were born. 

From the very beginning, we knew this wasn’t just about building another load board. The coordination problem in logistics was so big and messy, only machines could solve it.

Six years in, our bots now search for tenders, match cargo, talk to other systems, update locations, and handle negotiations. The only piece left is the truck that drives itself.

How it started: apples, SMS, and chaos

My first business was in high school — my mates and I were building and selling video games. But game development needed consistency and a stable team. I had neither. So at university, I turned to something even messier: trucking.

The opportunity came from a fruit season crisis. A juice factory couldn’t find enough trucks to move apples. Together with a friend, we scraped a carrier database and started sending SMS blasts to drivers: “Load available. Pick up here, deliver there.”

It worked and, in just a couple months, we made over $20,000. That’s how we accidentally built a transportation company.

We bought trucks, ran operations; the business was bringing money. But over time, I realized that a traditional operation driven by hustle, with little to no tech wasn’t the kind of company I wanted to build. Instead, I was looking for something with real leverage.

From Uber for trucks to AI-powered dispatch

After trying a few more projects, I teamed up with Dimitris Alexiou and Alex Kovalchuk to launch Cargofy — our version of Uber for trucks for Europe, inspired by GoGoVan and Lalamove in Asia.

A bit of history: In 2017, we registered the company in the U.S., but we only began scaling it seriously in 2021. Then in 2023, we launched Cargohub to cover the other side of the market — the companies posting cargo tenders. That same year, we merged both products into a holding company, Forward Group. Today, it’s a team of around 70 people.

We now serve over a thousand paying customers globally — mostly small and mid-size carriers. Larger companies who run tenders bring in higher checks. We can’t disclose everyone, but names like Aurora and Metinvest are using our service in Ukraine. 

We have clients across Central Asia, Europe, and North America.

The AI pigeon that closes deals while you sleep

We always planned to build Cargofy around AI. Early on, we created a pigeon mascot — a nod to how freight used to move through phone calls and paperwork, and a symbol of how we imagined it could be done smarter.

In 2023, when the technology finally caught up, we got to work.

Two years in, the Cargofy agent monitors 50 load boards at once. When it finds a suitable load, it places a bid and contacts the shipper with an offer. It can run the process end-to-end or wait for a manager to approve the deal.

On the Cargohub side, the agent works for shippers, helping them run tenders and contact carriers through messengers, email or voice AI. Each company sets its own rules, whether that’s lowest price, highest rating, or something else.

The agents have even started talking to each other. That’s already happened a few times and over time, more of these negotiations will happen without human involvement.

The system runs on OpenAI and DeepSeek models in parallel, switching between them if needed. Meta’s Llama handles data structuring. ElevenLabs powers the voice, and we use Sesame in the U.S. for better English performance.

But what makes the agent truly useful is the training data with seven years of routes, bids, and back-and-forth negotiations. Built on real logistics data, it handles tasks like a dispatcher with years of experience rather than a simple chatbot.

What began as a simple “pigeon idea” has become a system that handles freight like a full-time broker without ever needing a break.

Investing $5M in AI, and it’s just the beginning

From the beginning, AI has been our core product — not a side feature. That focus is backed by numbers: We’ve invested over $5 million into R&D, using both external funding and our own revenue.

We measure results the way any startup should: by valuation and active users. Since 2022, our valuation has grown 4x. The exact figure is private, but we’re now serving over 1,000 clients worldwide.

To date, we’ve raised $4 million from investors, including Flyer One Ventures (Ukraine) and Superangel (Estonia). 

The business model is straightforward: subscriptions and usage-based fees. Carriers pay based on fleet size, shippers based on how many tenders they run. Subscription plans range from $100 to $10,000 per month, with some contracts reaching $100,000 per year.

For clients who prefer not to subscribe, we offer a usage-based model — taking around 6% for each successful match made by the agent.

Putting logistics on autopilot

Cargofy’s goal is to put logistics on autopilot. Right now, our AI handles the repetitive work — emails, routine negotiations, bid matching. But the real target is full automation, where freight moves without human input.

To reach that, we’re closing a new funding round to keep building fast, working to double our revenue, and finally opening a Kyiv office — something we’ve planned since before the full-scale war.

Version 1.0 of our AI agent is almost ready — trained, tested, and built to scale. Once launched, the agent goes beyond just finding cargo. It can guide users through the product, answer support questions, and help with onboarding.

Over time, interfaces across logistics and most tech shrink to a single chat. You describe what you need, and the bot handles the rest.

What began as a simple tool is now a system that understands, decides, and acts on its own. And we’re just getting started.

This story is a translated and edited version of the Liga.net article, titled “The future of transportation: Ukrainian startup has taught AI to find cargo and drivers.”

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