Last-mile delivery network FetchGoat accepted in Microsoft startup program

Fort Worth, Texas-based startup FetchGoat announced Friday it has been accepted into the global program Microsoft for Startups to accelerate the growth of its delivery management system for shippers to manage and monitor their last-mile delivery networks.

Led by industry veteran Bill Hale, FetchGoat’s founder and CEO told FreightWaves the company has bootstrapped itself, building its management system that is currently working with a handful of large shippers in industries such as pharmaceuticals, food service and apparel.

By combining those shippers’ last-mile delivery providers onto one platform, FetchGoat’s shippers are able to leverage a large capacity network along with analytics to cut unproductive routing from their current delivery stops.

“We are bringing visibility to enterprise shippers that have multiple last-mile delivery providers and giving them a visibility tool in a single dashboard where they can manage all of their operations in one place,” said Hale.

According to a 2022 study by Technavio, the last-mile delivery market is expected to increase by $143.75 billion from 2021 to 2026. This growing market is what attracted Microsoft for Startups to FetchGoat.

“Simply put, we want to work with the best startups,” said Jeffrey Ma, vice president of Microsoft for Startups. “[We] are looking forward to helping FetchGoat deliver and scale their innovative solution. FetchGoat’s mission to address a desperate need for innovation in one of the fastest-growing segments of the last-mile logistics industry via their platform is truly revolutionary and a great fit for the program.”

Being a bootstrap company, Hale was excited to be accepted into the program that currently sits at a 2% acceptance rate, according to FetchGoat.

Launched in 2018 with $500 million, Microsoft for Startups comes with benefits that include hundreds of thousands of Azure credits, subscriptions to Office 365, Dynamics 365, PowerBI, architectural design sessions and consultations, and sometimes seed funding.

While terms of FetchGoat’s and Microsoft’s partnership were not disclosed, the benefits provided will help the company “come out of stealth mode” as it currently already leverages Azure Web Apps, Managed SQL Server and other Azure-hosted services to maintain its last-mile management system.

“One of the more challenging aspects of any tech startup is to strategically coordinate the scale of the organization. Working closely with Microsoft will help ensure we are utilizing best practices to develop rapidly without incurring technical debt. I have been working within the Microsoft ecosystem for most of my career and look forward to being able to leverage my expertise without the constraints that usually impede rapid scaling,” said Chris Malin, chief technology officer of FetchGoat.