Madrid-based OnTruck, which develops a platform to match supply and demand in the road freight industry, raises €25M Series B led by Cathay Innovation
Madrid-based OnTruck, which has built a “haulage tech platform” to better match supply and demand in the road freight industry …
Context & Ripple Effects
OnTruck's €25M Series B lands mid-way through a multi-year run of venture money into freight-matching software: Trucker Path connected independent drivers with brokers back in 2015 ($20M Series A), and just four months before this round Next Trucking raised its own $21M Series B for a shipper-carrier marketplace on the US side.
The significance of the Cathay Innovation-led round is what it buys OnTruck time to prove in Europe what the US cohort already demonstrated — Next Trucking turned that $21M into a $97M Series C barely a year later, showing how quickly these marketplaces escalate once liquidity builds.
First-order effects
- Cathay Innovation's €25M gives OnTruck the runway to densify its supply-demand matching network across Spanish and wider European road freight, where carrier-shipping brokerage remains fragmented and offline.
- Traditional freight brokers and forwarders in OnTruck's markets now face a funded competitor whose core pitch is disintermediating exactly their match-making margin.
Second-order effects
- The Next Trucking trajectory — $21M Series B to $97M Series C inside twelve months — becomes the benchmark European investors will hold OnTruck to, pressuring it to show network-liquidity growth fast enough to justify an equivalent step-up.
- As matching platforms commoditize the connection itself, value migrates to adjacent services layered on top of the load: cash-flow management, insurance, and payments — the territory CloudTrucks ($115M Series B) and PayCargo ($130M Series C) later scaled in the US.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, road freight intermediation restructures around software platforms that own the transaction, squeezing independent brokers between shipper-side marketplaces and carrier-side tools.
- The funding sequence across this corpus — matching first, then financing and back-office services — points to freight platforms consolidating into full-stack operators of the trucking economy rather than staying pure marketplaces.
The trend: Road freight is being re-intermediated by venture-backed software platforms, with capital escalating from load-matching marketplaces toward full-stack financial and operational services for carriers.