Investing in Conlio: the Verification Layer for Freight

A truck unloads 26 pallets at a warehouse; the driver gets a stamped CMR (the standard consignment note for international road transport in Europe), a proof of delivery and a pallet exchange note. Two weeks later, the carrier sends an invoice to the freight forwarder that booked the load. Before that invoice can be paid, someone in the forwarder's finance team has to open four or five documents side by side and confirm that the price, the route, the pallet count and any surcharges all match what was actually agreed and delivered. A large forwarder does this thousands of times a month, mostly by hand.

Conlio was founded to take that work off people's desks. Today we are happy to share that F-LOG Ventures has invested in Conlio as part of its €6.4 million funding round, led by Piton Capital.

The gap between delivery and payment

Freight is one of the largest industries in the world and a surprising share of its work still happens in documents rather than in systems. Every shipment produces evidence that it happened: consignment notes, delivery receipts, pallet notes, damage reports, waiting-time confirmations and finally an invoice. These documents arrive as scans, photos and PDFs from hundreds of different carriers, each with its own format.

Freight forwarders sit at the financial control point of this network. They are paid by the shipper and they pay the carrier, so they carry the risk when the two sides do not match. That makes freight audit (checking that what was billed matches what was agreed and delivered) one of the most important (and least loved) jobs in the industry.

When the checking is done by hand, three things go wrong.

1. Teams grow in line with shipment volume, so the cost never really goes down.
2. Mistakes slip through in both directions, which means forwarders overpay carriers in some cases and fail to pass on legitimate surcharges to shippers in others (often called revenue leakage).
3. Settlement takes weeks since every mismatch has to be chased by email, which ties up working capital for forwarders and puts pressure on the smaller carriers who are waiting to be paid.

Why now

People have tried to automate freight audit before. Earlier tools relied on templates and rules, which worked for the handful of large carriers that send clean electronic invoices and broke down on everything else: a handwritten note on a CMR, a surcharge described in a free-text line, a delivery receipt photographed at an angle in a dark loading bay. Since most European road freight is moved by small carriers, "everything else" is most of the volume.

Recent AI models changed what is possible here. They can now read messy, inconsistent documents with high accuracy, understand what each line means in context, and compare it against the agreed rate, the transport order and the other documents for the same shipment. That turns a job that needed a trained person into one that software can do for the large majority of cases, while sending only the genuine exceptions to a human. We believe this opens up a new category of freight software, built around verifying operational data and turning it into financial decisions rather than simply storing it.

From documents to decisions

Conlio is building the financial verification layer for freight: the software that sits between transport execution and payment and decides whether an invoice is correct. Rather than trying to cover freight operations broadly, the team has chosen to start with the document-heavy workflows where errors cost money directly, and to do that one job very well.

The platform reads every document that belongs to a shipment, including carrier invoices, CMRs, proofs of delivery, pallet notes and damage reports, and checks them against each other and against the transport order and agreed rates. When everything matches, the invoice is approved and moves on to payment without anyone touching it. When something does not match, Conlio flags the specific problem (a missing waiting-time confirmation, a pallet count that differs between two documents, a surcharge that was never agreed) so that the team only spends time on real exceptions. Conlio connects to the transport management and accounting systems that forwarders already use, so customers do not have to change how they work to get the benefit.

Early deployments show what this means in practice. Conlio automates more than 90% of freight document checks for its customers, reduces manual workload in finance and operations teams, and regularly finds overpayments and missed revenue that would otherwise have gone unnoticed. Because those savings show up directly in a forwarder's profit, the return on the software is easy for customers to measure. In its first ten months of selling, Conlio signed ten paying customers in Germany, the UK, Spain and Denmark.

A team that has lived this problem

A large part of our conviction comes from the team. Conlio is led by founder and CEO Dr. Claudio Consul, who was previously Senior Vice President of Product at Sennder, one of Europe's largest digital road freight forwarders. At Sennder he saw from the inside how much of a forwarder's cost and risk sits in the reconciliation of documents and invoices, and how little of it existing software had touched.

Claudio has brought together people who combine that freight experience with the ability to build AI products. Several of them worked together at Sennder before joining Conlio.

Teams that understand freight rarely know how to build modern AI software, and strong AI teams rarely understand freight well enough to know which details matter. Conlio has both, and it shows in how quickly the product has gone from first pilots to paying customers.

Looking ahead

The next generation of freight software will be built around automated workflows that check, decide and act on operational data, rather than around systems that only record it. Invoice verification is where that shift has the clearest financial impact today, and it gives Conlio a natural starting point to expand into the wider set of decisions that connect what happens on the road with what happens in the books.

Conlio's €6.4 million round is led by Piton Capital, with participation from Haufe Group Ventures, WaVe-X (the venture arm of the WALTER Group) and F-LOG Ventures. Existing investors System.One, Puzzle Ventures, Booom Ventures and Yellow also took part.

We are excited to work alongside Claudio and the team, and to support them as Conlio becomes the standard way freight gets verified and paid. If you run a freight forwarding business and recognise the problem described above, the team would like to hear from you at conlio.com.

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