OneRail, the Orlando, Florida-based last-mile delivery provider that uses technology to optimize a vast courier network, announced Wednesday morning that it had raised a $33 million Series B round of capital funding from Piva Capital and Arsenal Growth. American Tire Distributors, a customer, also participated in the round as a strategic investor.
Founded in 2018 by Bill and Lisa Catania, OneRail builds software to help its customers manage their deliveries — sometimes that means helping them shop rates across large parcel integrators, but often that means connecting the shipper directly to OneRail’s own network of courier partners. OneRail’s network includes everything from drivers who use personal vehicles like sedans and SUVs to make deliveries to larger vehicles like commercial vans and straight trucks.
“Since our Series A round in 2021, we’ve grown revenue year-over-year by 312% and have expanded service to over 330 U.S. cities,” said OneRail CEO and founder Bill Catania in a statement. “As the connective tissue between our customers, courier networks and consumers, our delivery fulfillment system is currently transacting over 12 million data calls per minute, producing a mountain of data which is further unlocked through this growth round of funding, helping our customers achieve greater efficiencies, new fulfillment capabilities and corporate sustainability objectives.”
Focusing on the business-to-business rather than the consumer market has allowed OneRail to acquire large-volume customers, achieve density in key markets and build deep relationships with couriers. All of that helps OneRail achieve its mission of making last-mile delivery “more sustainable, more affordable and more dependable,” as Catania put it.
Today, OneRail moves more than 1 million shipments per month out of more than 10,000 origins to millions of destinations, including more than 4,400 Advance Auto Parts stores. OneRail ended 2021 with approximately 75 employees and has about 130 people now.
Catania said that OneRail would use the Series B funding to scale its sales and marketing teams, adding business development representatives, segmenting their approach to more specifically target customer personas and bringing on leaders like incoming Chief Revenue Officer Ron Richardson, who joins OneRail after stints at FourKites and Turvo. A more intense initiative around data science is also in the works as OneRail begins to leverage its mountain of transactional data to further solve the matching and pricing problems in its courier network.
“It’s a joy — it’s amazing to see something you started at your kitchen table get to this scale and know it can go so much further,” Catania said, adding that he’s also looking at other modes, like less-than-truckload.
Catania said that sentiment in capital markets had noticeably shifted since OneRail’s Series A and that venture funding for Series B and later stages was harder to come by than in 2021. He said that while the process of closing the round was very similar, due diligence and customer validation took about twice as long as OneRail’s Series A. Ty Findley, general partner at existing investor Ironspring Ventures, introduced Catania to Adzmel Adznan at Piva Capital, a San Francisco-based venture firm with a focus on industrials. Catania had a relationship with Arsenal Growth, which has previously invested in the delivery space with Cart.com and Orderbot.
“We made sure that with this round we can drive our business model to profitability,” Catania said, indicating that while he wouldn’t rule out raising more capital in the future if the opportunity made sense, he intended the Series B to be the last round OneRail needed to raise.