- Conlio has raised €6.4 million in a funding round led by Piton Capital to automate freight paperwork via AI.
- Walter Group and Fiege also raised capital through their venture arms.
- Conlio says its AI can automate over 90% of freight document checks.
At Sennder, a large team used to manually review incoming freight docs before paying carriers or invoicing shippers. Dr Claudio Consul, senior vice president of product, saw the potential in large language models to do that work for you. He’s now raised €6.4 million for Berlin-based Conlio to prove it.
Piton Capital, a London-based venture firm specialising in online businesses with network effects, led the round, with WaVe-X, the venture arm of Austria’s WALTER GROUP, F-LOG and Haufe Group Ventures also joining. Existing investors are System. Existing investors include System.One, Puzzle Ventures, Booom Ventures, Yellow, 2100 Ventures, and Anamcara Capital.
Manual freight paperwork verification team
Consul has a PhD in fluid dynamics from Oxford and an engineering background. He started in the tech world as an investor before joining sennder, a Berlin-based digital freight forwarder valued at over $1 billion in 2021. He joined the company when it had fewer than 200 people and was instrumental in its growth to over 1,000.
“At sennder, we had a large team that manually checked all the incoming freight documents — CMRs, pallet notes, weighing slips, roll cards — before paying the subcontractors, the carriers on the supply side, as well as being able to issue invoices in the direction of the freight payers and the shippers. Once LLMs fell out of the sky, I was convinced that this very important process step could now be automated,” Consul tells Tech Funding News.
CMRs are the standard international road consignment notes. Consul says that after months of talking to forwarders, he identified a consistent pain point and founded Conlio in Berlin in 2024. He very deliberately chose to be a solo founder.
Conlio’s freight document verification process
A single CMR can have up to four dates, such as issue, collection, and delivery. The issue is working out which date relates to which event. Conlio reviews each date in turn against the shipment requirements.
The documentation comes in all sorts of formats and languages, with many handwritten notes, and the rules can vary enormously from customer to customer, route to route, and location to location. Conlio works with the mid-sized and large road freight forwarders in Germany, the UK, Spain and Denmark.
Consul points to three main benefits: fewer manual checks, fewer errors and overpayments, and faster invoicing, which in turn helps forwarders with cash flow by enabling earlier invoicing. The platform takes multi-page batches and splits them into individual documents, identifies the document type, and matches it to the correct transport order and delivery. That’s normally done manually. The models don’t require any training.
Conlio then checks the document content against the order, looks for stamps/signatures, checks for handwritten notes about short deliveries or damage, and confirms the data aligns with the order.
There are two possible outcomes: the order will close automatically, or Conlio will flag a discrepancy for a person to review and decide whether to close it or check with the partner. Even in flagged cases, the cases are already sorted, labelled, and matched, which Consul says reduces manual work.
Human oversight is a part of the process. “A human in the loop is very important. It’s a design principle for us,” he says. Conlio always reviews flagged discrepancies and aims for zero false positives.
“If we close a transport order or give the green light for payment to be released, that decision can be trusted,” Consul says. His example is an invoice for €1,100 against an agreed €1,000. A false positive would require the system to misread the amount as exactly €1,000, which he calls extremely unlikely.
The company can automate over 90% of the freight document checks, thereby reducing overpayments and speeding up the invoicing process. Conlio also claims it can increase a forwarder’s EBIT by up to 30%.
The market is moving very slowly. Transport Intelligence estimates European road freight at €440.4 billion in 2025 and forecasts €483 billion by 2030. Several freight AI startups are in the field: Cargofy just closed a $11 million Series A for its AI dispatchers, Opereit raised $2.5 million for its logistics agents, and MyDello in Estonia raised €3.1 million to go head to head with Flexport.
Strategic investors, major competitors, and a focus on financing
Conlio’s funding is currently going into tech and headcount, with a particular emphasis on sales and regional expansion. Consul aims to build a European champion. The company has 10 people on the books and has not disclosed its valuation or any hiring plans.
Michael Macklin, partner at Piton Capital, said, “Road freight forwarding handles huge volumes of transactions dependent on manual checks, and many people have been stumped on how to fix this. The product is already embedded in customers’ daily operations and we believe that [it] can build a platform with powerful network effects as more participants join and more transactions flow through it.”
“AI is moving from pilot projects into the core processes of freight forwarding, and the finance back office is one of the areas where the impact is most immediate. Conlio turns unstructured freight documents into verified transaction data, which is the foundation for genuinely automated, increasingly agentic workflows,” added Thomas Muscher, managing director at WaVe-X.
Conlio’s next steps will depend on two specific questions. Are WALTER GROUP and FIEGE just shareholders, or are they also customers? And if the financing is based on documents approved by AI, who bears the risk?
