FreightCaviar Visits Berlin, Germany: A Freight Tech Hub

The FreightCaviar crew (minus our co-founder, Krystian, and Danelle, our social media manager) are currently in Berlin, Germany, to visit the co-founders of Levity.ai.

On our drive into the city yesterday, we drove past the Tesla Gigafactory, which also made headlines a couple of weeks ago. Elon Musk said, "I think it makes sense to produce the Tesla Semi in Europe at Gigafactory Berlin."

Although no specific timeline was given for when that will happen, it shows that Elon and Tesla are interested in conquering the European semi-market.

Berlin, which some dub the “Silicon Valley” of the EU, also has a vibrant freight tech scene.

Yesterday, I had the opportunity to interview the co-founders of Levity.ai, a freight tech startup focused on helping you clean your inbox via automation and AI. Let’s say you get an email from a customer asking for a quote. With Levity.ai, you can set up automations in your inbox in which it automatically detects it's a rate quote. The AI then sends that information to your rate engine tool, let’s say it’s Greenscreens.ai. Greenscreens.ai generates a quote on that lane, and then Levity.ai pulls it into your email and writes up a reply to your customer. You then have the choice to potentially add 5% to the quote (if you know the customer is flexible), or you can just click send. Instead of having to do all that work manually, you now have automations working for you.

Let’s give another example with a tracking update. The customer is now asking for a tracking update for a load. Levity.ai detects that it’s a tracking update. It pulls the relevant information the customer provided (like load #, PO#, etc.), then scans your TMS, which should have the latest update, and it creates an email draft for you in your inbox, in which you can just click send or edit slightly if you want to include something more personal.

I ended up interviewing them for an episode of “The FreightCaviar Podcast,” where we get into how they started, why they chose the US freight market to penetrate with this product, and the differences in doing business with German/EU companies vs. the US market. The episode should be out in a few weeks.

To add to Berlin’s vibrant freight tech scene, I wanted to mention that yesterday when we were driving from Warsaw, Poland, to Berlin, Germany, Ted Alling, the former CEO & Co-Founder of Access America and a Partner at Dynamo Ventures, a Chattanooga-based VC firm specializing in logistics investing, DM'd me on X to tell me about a couple of other companies in Berlin they have invested in. One of them is Sennder. Sennder actually acquired Uber Freight's European business back in 2020 and is the most well-known digital freight broker on the EU market. Besides that, there is a startup called Rouvia. I am meeting with their Founder & Managing Director today in Berlin.

Stay tuned for the latest updates on our trip to Berlin here on FreightCaviar.com and across our social media channels.