Zurich-based early-stage startup Arqh, founded by Antonia Unger and Mert Erkul, has closed a $3.8 million pre-seed round to solve one of logistics’ most persistent problems: real-time decision-making in an industry still dependent on phone calls and Excel. The round was led by Founderful, with participation from Merantix Capital.
“While we’re not disclosing the valuation, the new funding allows us to focus on growth and scaling our team,” said Antonia Unger, co-founder and CEO of Arqh, to TFN.
The capital will support the expansion of Arqh’s engineering and research teams and accelerate the development of its next-generation “decision intelligence” engine. Since launching just 14 weeks ago, Arqh claims its AI platform has helped logistics teams reduce fleet operating costs by over 15% and decrease manual planning efforts by around 80%.
Hybrid agentic” optimisation platform
Unger, whose experience in logistics led her to see the limitations of existing tools, told TFN, “For decades, the industry has been forced back to manual planning. Off-the-shelf optimisers couldn’t handle the real world’s messiness. We built Arqh to do both, making sure dispatchers stay in the loop, while our ‘hybrid brain’ translates unpredictable real-world language into plans that actually work.”
She continues, “Planning in logistics is still largely manual and brittle: planners juggle changing orders, traffic, driver constraints, SLAs, and costs across disconnected tools. On the other end of the spectrum, some companies maintain teams of 10–20 data scientists (MSc and PhD level) to build custom, perfectly fitting solutions. We’re making this complex mathematical task accessible to every company in the space.”
Unlike many AI startups promising supply chain upgrades, Arqh emphasises explainability and adaptability. Dispatchers can command their AI-driven Command Tower to prioritise urgent deliveries, and the system quickly simulates thousands of scenarios to deliver cost-effective and easy-to-understand plans.
Arqh’s technology combines large language models with a novel “hybrid agentic” optimisation platform that processes complex, real-world inputs to generate mathematically optimal routing plans, even when disruptions like traffic, accidents, or customer changes occur throughout the day.
Unger explains, “Arqh is an agentic system that pairs language models (to interpret messy, real‑world inputs and human intent) with rigorous optimisation (to produce provably good plans under constraints). The result: (1) no more Excel sheets or manual TMS workflows, and (2) no PhD/data‑science teams needed to crack a company’s specific planning needs. Other solutions in the market are either (1) or (2); nobody is able to combine both.”
What’s next?
Looking forward, Arqh plans to deepen integration with existing fleet management software, grow its R&D capabilities, and collaborate with design partners to support increasingly dynamic and larger logistics networks.
“Our vision is to become the AI brain behind the most dynamic and complex planning challenges, starting with last-mile logistics and eventually orchestrating entire supply-chain ecosystems and beyond,” Unger says.
And how is it being a woman in tech?
When asked, Unger concludes, “When you work with a team that truly puts the shared mission first, labels like gender/nationality/seniority matter less and intellectual honesty wins. We only work with people who are equally obsessed with our mission, so that culture follows.
Needless to say, there are too few women in tech – fewer as founders, and even fewer in logistics. The way we change that is by showing up as a matter of course, as if we’ve always been there – doing great work and helping the next wave do the same. As a result, others will question it less.”
