ZUUM Transportation keeps focus on digital transformation and helping customers navigate COVID-19

With a total capital raise approaching $13 million, Irvine, Calif.-based ZUUM Transportation Inc., has its sights set on spurring on digital transformation within logistics to address the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on global supply chains, which have, in many ways, seen businesses on the search for new ways to keep operations running.

What’s more, Matt Tabatabai, ZUUM COO and Co-Founder, said its recent funding announcement, of $8.58 million, which brings its total raise to $12.58 million, is enabling Zuum to focus on bringing new, more efficient real-time solutions to the logistics and freight transportation sectors.

Established in 2016, ZUUM delivers thousands of loads per month for more than 235 shippers, which includes various Fortune 500 companies, according to company officials. The company’s flagship offering—the Logistics Super Platform (LSP)—focuses on automating freight throughout the United States through its digital freight marketplace (DFM), shipper TMS, broker software, and carrier TMS, driver app, with benefits for each grouping, including: real-time visibility and instant freight quotes for shippers; accelerated load coverage and automated client notifications for brokers; and transparent commissions, profitable loads, and route optimization for carriers.

In an August interview, he told LM that the key focus for ZUUM, since its 2016 inception, goes back to the defragmentation and decentralization, coupled with a lack of visibility, within logistics, which he called the biggest problem in the industry, and comes with myriad inefficiencies.

And this week, LM Group News Editor caught up with Tabatabai to discuss ZUUM's next steps for its recent funding announcement, how it is helping its customers combat COVID-19 concerns, and future plans for the company, among others. Their conversation follows below. 

LM: Can you please provide some specific examples of how Zuum's recent funding is bringing new, more efficient, real-time solutions to the logistics and transportation sectors?   

Tabatabai: ZUUM Transportation has allocated 40% of our last round of seed funding to technology development in order to bring new, more efficient, real-time solutions to the logistics industry. Our recent funding has accelerated our development of predictive and real-time analytics. Real-time analytics can help with shipment and facility insights and shippers can improve the efficiency of their supply chain. ZUUM’s Logistics Super Platform provides visibility into every step of the shipping process, and provides customized reporting on factors that most impact costs to freight transportation: appointment lead times, appointment windows, OTP and OTD, facility performance, and more.

These insights are particularly useful in the midst of the current pandemic. We’re currently working with shippers to analyze how their facilities are performing during the pandemic crisis. This can help logistics teams understand how their supply chain is performing compared to others in their industry, identify inefficiencies, and adapt to improve supply chain operations.

Furthermore, the funding has contributed to improving automation and our instant smart pricing tool within our Logistics Super Platform. ZUUM’s Logistics Super Platform lets shippers see instant upfront pricing, can book a load with only a few clicks, and track their shipment every step of the way. Shippers want transparent contract, backup, and spot pricing. They also want to save time and money while getting reliable and flexible access to capacity. ZUUM helps shippers achieve this through the use of technology that automatically bids, prices, and makes real-time tender decisions for contract, backup and spot freight. While the majority of shipment volume is contracted through an annual RFP process, the COVID-19 crisis created sudden and unexpected demand surges, reinforcing the need for reliable backup and spot options.

LM: How has ZUUM's Logistics Super Platform helped to address ongoing uncertainties in supply and demand due to COVID-19, coupled with freight rates fluctuating and finding capacity having become even more challenging?

Tabatabai: ZUUM is helping shippers overcome COVID-19 challenges by delivering reliable and flexible truck supply. The reliability of a carrier and the flexibility of a broker. This combination of reliability and flexibility has proved useful to shippers especially when consumers flooded supermarkets to purchase food and household supplies. To meet surges in demand, shippers required more freight coverage on primary lanes than they initially predicted. ZUUM automatically scaled its capacity to meet demand through our network of more than 20,000 carriers.

As carriers and brokers couldn’t reposition trailers or respond to quickly shifting demand, backup and spot shipment volume spiked and because our Logistics Super Platform automates the brokering process, we were able to scale where it was needed to fulfill the increase in demand and adapt to market changes.

Shippers want to work with trusted carriers and achieve high reliability for on-time pickup and delivery (OTP and OTD). During the unprecedented nationwide demand shocks over the last couple of months, you might expect service levels to suffer. Instead, our platform was able to adapt and deliver even higher levels of performance on OTP and OTD during the crisis than in the preceding weeks. This performance can be attributed to both the underlying technology (the automation through shipper TMS and carrier TMS, and driver app) and our network of high-quality carriers and drivers. 

LM: What are some other ways and/or future plans, in which ZUUM will leverage its recent funding to help customers solve COVID-19-related problems/issues? 

Tabatabai: Our goal at this point is to scale our business as quickly as we can while solving our customers’ pain points, including COVID-19-related challenges. Being one of the most innovative and comprehensive solutions out there—and the first logistics super platform—we are going to continue to further develop functionalities for our product, driven by real needs - and expand our strong partnerships. We have already integrated seven functional platforms into the ZUUM Logistics Super Platform, and we are going to continue to identify what the market needs and bring it to the market fast.

Specific focus areas for ZUUM technology development is improving the actionable intelligence and predictive analytics in our Logistics Super Platform. We are on a mission to bring unprecedented visibility and transparency to our shippers through our technology. We want to help our shippers mitigate risks by forecasting where supply chains are potentially at risk. 

ZUUM’s Logistics Super Platform is fully automated, making it well suited for these volatile environments. Automated truck matching, pricing, and tender acceptance enable our network to instantly adapt to demand shocks. Our platform has proved resilient over the past few months, and it will serve shippers, brokers, and carriers well in the years to come.