Lunavo

What do they actually do

Lunavo builds an AI assistant for trucking carriers and freight forwarders that automates routine back‑office work. It reads incoming documents (emails, PDFs), extracts shipment fields, runs plausibility checks, writes standard events into the carrier’s TMS or customer portals, sends customer notifications, and supports tasks like bookings, invoicing, and payment tracking lunavo.ai YC Launch.

Day to day, dispatchers and back‑office teams use Lunavo to handle normal updates automatically and only get alerted for true exceptions (for example, a delay that triggers updates to the TMS and portals plus a single dispatcher notification) YC Launch. The product is being actively marketed via demos; the public site and YC pages describe workflows but do not list customer case studies as of now lunavo.ai YC company.

Who are their target customer(s)

• Dispatchers at small-to-mid trucking carriers: They manually open emails and PDFs, copy fields into the TMS, and send updates—work that creates delay and errors. Lunavo automates ingestion, extraction, and routine notifications so humans only see exceptions lunavo.ai YC Launch.
• Back‑office admins for bookings, invoicing, and payment follow‑up: High‑volume, repetitive paper‑and‑email processing and invoice reconciliation tie up staff. Lunavo automates bookings, invoice tracking, and TMS/portal updates to reduce manual load lunavo.ai.
• Freight forwarders and brokers: They juggle many carriers and portals, extracting shipment data from diverse documents and keeping systems in sync. Lunavo focuses on field extraction, plausibility checks, and writing to multiple systems to cut manual handoffs lunavo.ai YC Launch.
• Operations managers at regional/national carriers with legacy TMS: Rising volume strains inconsistent processes and weak integrations, increasing exceptions and headcount. Lunavo writes standard events into the TMS and surfaces only real exceptions to ease throughput and staffing pressure lunavo.ai YC Launch.
• Customer‑facing account teams: They get pulled into reactive firefights when customers call about problems late. Lunavo’s roadmap emphasizes proactive detection and automated notifications to enable fewer, higher‑value interactions lunavo.ai.

How would they acquire their first 10, 50, and 100 customers

• First 10: Run 6–8 week, white‑glove pilots with small‑to‑mid carriers and forwarders that still do manual TMS updates; Lunavo engineers handle initial document mapping and TMS writes to show immediate wins, in exchange for a small fee or free pilot plus feedback and a public testimonial lunavo.ai YC Launch.
• First 50: Turn pilot results into 1–2 case studies, then drive targeted outbound to similar carriers, run dispatcher‑focused webinars, and test a small paid campaign; in parallel, secure integrations/partner distribution with a few mid‑market TMS/GPS vendors to lower onboarding effort lunavo.ai YC Launch.
• First 100: Productize onboarding with self‑serve connectors and templated workflows plus clear usage or per‑shipment pricing; add a reseller/implementation partner program and a small success/SE team to support regional rollouts and keep churn low lunavo.ai.

What is the rough total addressable market

Top-down context:

Analysts size the global Transportation Management System (TMS) market at about $15.9B in 2024, with forecasts around $37B by 2030; North America is a major share of this total MarketsandMarkets Grand View Research.

Bottom-up calculation:

There are roughly 580,000 active U.S. motor carriers, and 91.5% operate 10 or fewer trucks—indicating a large, fragmented base where a subset runs back‑office workflows that benefit from automation ATA. If 5–20% of carriers adopt, and pricing ranges from entry‑level SaaS (e.g., $49–$99 per user/month for TMS benchmarks) to higher ACVs for deeper automation, the serviceable market sums to tens of millions to low hundreds of millions annually at modest penetration AscendTMS pricing.

Assumptions:

• Focus on U.S./North America carriers first; global expansion later.
• Only carriers with a dispatcher/back‑office function are near‑term targets.
• ACV varies by depth of integrations and automation scope (small teams vs. mid‑enterprise).

Who are some of their notable competitors

• Transflo: Carrier software with mobile/document capture and automated processing; extracts paperwork, routes documents into systems, and surfaces exceptions—overlapping Lunavo’s ingestion/OCR and back‑office automation scope.
• Shipwell: TMS + visibility vendor with an “AI assistant” for order creation, tracking, notifications, and document-to-load matching—competes where Lunavo aims to automate updates and customer communications.
• Loadsmart (CarrierGuide): Carrier product covering dispatch, document management, invoicing, and settlements for small‑to‑mid fleets—targets similar users and back‑office automation needs.
• AscendTMS: Widely used, low‑cost TMS with built‑in document management and portals; an alternative for small carriers that prefer a single TMS suite over adding an external assistant layer.
• Transfix: Broker-turned‑SaaS provider with Smart Uploads and automation features; competes on auto‑structuring paperwork and exception handling in carrier/broker workflows.