Berlin-based Conlio has raised €6.4 million, led by London's Piton Capital, to push its AI software for checking freight paperwork across Europe. The bet: that road freight forwarders, who live on thin margins in a market the company puts at €430 billion, will hand document checks and carrier settlement to machines.

Image: Conlio, via EU-Startups.

Conlio announced the round on 3 November. Piton Capital led, with Haufe Group Ventures joining alongside two logistics backers: WaVe-X, the investment arm of Austria's WALTER GROUP, and F-LOG Ventures, the venture fund of German contract logistics group FIEGE. Existing investors System.One, Puzzle Ventures, Booom Ventures and Yellow also took part. According to the company, the €6.4 million is the total it has raised to date. No valuation was disclosed.

The paper trail behind every truck

Every road freight job leaves behind a stack of documents: CMR consignment notes, proofs of delivery and carrier invoices. Before a forwarder pays the carrier or bills its own customer, someone has to check that those papers are complete and correct. They arrive in different formats and languages, often carry handwritten notes, and must be matched against rules that differ by customer, route and country. That is why much of the work is still done by hand.

Conlio, founded in Berlin in 2023 by Dr Claudio Consul, a former sennder executive, uses AI to turn those documents into verified data and then automate the financial workflow that follows. The company claims it can automate more than 90% of freight document checks and lift a forwarder's EBIT by up to 30%, which it says equals more than €1 million a year for a forwarder with €100 million in revenue. These figures come from Conlio and have not been independently verified; the company did not name customers or publish case studies alongside the announcement.

"Freight is one of the world's largest industries, and digitalisation has transformed large parts of it. But the industry is full of edge cases and decisions that depend on context, which has made true end-to-end automation difficult with traditional software. AI changes that," Consul said.

"At sennder, I saw first-hand how much operational complexity still sits behind freight documentation, settlement and payments," he added. "Our long-term ambition is to change how money moves across supply chains, and verified freight documents are where this begins."

Michael Macklin, investor at Piton Capital, said the product "is already embedded in customers' daily operations" and that the firm believes it "can build a platform with powerful network effects as more participants join and more transactions flow through it."

Why it matters

Back-office automation in freight has become one of Europe's busier corners of AI investment this year. Hamburg's Procuros raised €20 million for supply-chain data exchange and invoicing, Berlin's cargo.one secured nearly €17 million, and smaller rounds went to Cargofy in Ukraine, Vectrix in Belgium, Plinto in Denmark and Zalos in the UK, according to EU-Startups.

Conlio's round is modest by comparison, but its cap table is telling: two of its new backers are themselves large logistics operators, which gives the start-up a potential route to real transaction volume. The harder test is the one Consul names himself. Freight paperwork is full of exceptions, and the 90% automation claim will be judged on the last 10% that still lands on a clerk's desk. If Conlio can show that, its stated ambition to move into payments across supply chains becomes far more credible.

Sources

• Conlio funding announcement, 3 November 2026, via EU-Startups