Harish Abbott, Deliverr cofounder and former Shopify vice president, launched a new startup called Augment out of stealth on Tuesday.

Augment is building an AI assistant for the logistics industry. It has raised $25 million in seed funding, led by 8VC.

The AI assistant, called Augie, can respond to emails and Slack messages, make and receive phone calls, manage workflows, and perform other routine tasks.

“You can text them, you can email them, you can message them on Slack. You can assign work to them, and they go about doing their work,” Abbott told Business Insider in an exclusive interview.

Abbott said the idea for Augment came from a desire to use AI to make an impact on an industry he knows well. He cofounded Deliverr, a startup that built software to enable quick shipping, and sold it to Shopify for $2.1 billion in 2022. A year later, Shopify sold Deliverr (and the rest of its logistics business) to Flexport. Abbott spent just under a year at Flexport before starting to build Augment in the summer of 2024.

Augment will start in trucking, targeting shippers, brokers, and trucking companies before expanding to the larger logistics industry. Abbott said that Augie has been used in businesses that collectively have $20 billion of freight under management. Its early customers include Austin-based brokerage Arrive Logistics and third-party logistics provider NFI.

Trucking is a nearly trillion-dollar industry in the US, and trucking companies serve as the connective tissue for commerce, transporting shipments between warehouses, ports, and retail stores. The last three years have been difficult for this industry as it’s endured one of the longest recessions in its history. This means transportation companies are looking for ways to alleviate pressure on their margins, Abbott said.

It’s also a very fragmented industry. There are hundreds of thousands of trucking companies in the US, and no one standard system they all use to conduct business, besides email. Abbott said that when shadowing people working in this space, he saw that employees receive as many as 500 to 600 emails a day.

“When a shipper has to book a truck, they email maybe four or five brokers,” Abbott said. “The broker responds, then they go back and forth and negotiate on a bid. Then the broker takes that and emails 10 or 15 trucking companies, then they respond.”

‘Logistics is not solved’

Abbott said his time at Shopify gave him an “even stronger feel of the problems” faced by the millions of merchants using the e-commerce platform. Getting their products to customers remains one of merchants’ biggest challenges and costs.

His time at Flexport, meanwhile, showed how “messy” global trade can be.

“It reinforced for me that one, logistics is not solved. Two, it’s crucially important. And three, I think AI is the answer to these problems,” he said.

Augie runs on different large language models depending on the scenario, including Anthropic’s Claude, OpenAI’s GPT-4, Meta’s Llama, and DeepSeek. It learns from employees’ emails, phone calls, and documents about how workers typically do their jobs. Abbott said that while Augie learns quickly, it still needs the help of employees to make decisions as it can’t understand the nuance of human relationships.

“That’s why the model for Augie is: I’m gonna superpower you, my human boss. I’m gonna bring you the knowledge. I’m gonna work 24/7 to take all the tedious parts away,” Abbott said. “Now you can make a better judgment call than you would otherwise because you were so busy before.”

Augment’s founding team also includes CTO Artur Rivilis, who ran engineering for Deliverr, served as vice president of engineering at Shopify, and then spent some time at Flexport after its acquisition of Shopify Logistics. Cofounder Justin Hall, who will lead growth for Augment, had stints as CEO of logistics company Primo and as chief customer officer at YRC Worldwide. Hall was also previously an executive in residence at 8VC.

8VC, founded by Palantir cofounder Joe Lonsdale, was also the first investor in Deliverr.

“Augment’s an even bigger idea — one that parallels Palantir’s approach of understanding the workflow and knowledge ontology, to apply AI and solve critical problems,” Lonsdale said. “Harish is poised to build a generational company that brings productivity and intelligence to one of the largest industries in the world.”

Augment has a team of about 50 people, mostly working in engineering. It plans to build a customer success team in Chicago. It has offices in Chicago, San Francisco, and Toronto.

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