Buzzy freight-matching startup Forager nabs Chicago serial ad tech entrepreneur as president
- Freight-matching startup Forager, founded in late 2018, specializes in cross-border freight matching.
- Forager has a new president - Marc Kiven, who cofounded the ad tech company Signal in 2009, joined the company last month.
- Matt Silver, the CEO and cofounder of Forager, says the logistics newbie will bring "tech entrepreneur experience" to the startup.
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Freight-matching startups have been snagging top tech talent left and right.
The New York-based Flexport hired a longtime Etsy VP and a 19-year veteran of Intel this year. Convoy, which raised $400 million in fresh funding last month, snagged the PayScale chief sales officer and a general marketing manager at Amazon Web Services. Convoy itself was founded by two former Amazon execs.
And just last week, Uber Freight appointed Yelp veteran Raj Subbiah as its head of product.
Now, the Chicago-based Forager has a new techie leading its team: Marc Kiven, most recently the cofounder and CEO of ad tech company Signal in 2009. Meeting the team at Forager this year while exploring advisory and board membership roles sparked his interest in the world of logistics.
"I was really very intrigued by what they were doing and what was going on in the logistics space," Kiven, who was in the ad tech space beginning in 1998, told Business Insider. "It quite honestly reminded me of the digital advertising space 20 years ago - a huge fragmented industry ripe for the implementation of advanced and sophisticated technologies."
Forager is in its early days, founded just over a year ago. It holds $4.8 million in seed funding raised in July 2019. The company sets itself apart from other freight-matching startups with a specialization in cross-border freight, allowing shippers to move goods between the US, Canada, and Mexico.
In October, Forager launched Scout - a platform that allows shippers to see pricing, instantly book, and then track those loads as they move across North America.
Hiring Kiven to Forager, despite his lack of logistics experience, solidifies the startup as a tech company, rather than just another brokerage, CEO and cofounder Matt Silver said.
"I think it provides the exact perfect balance between the tribal knowledge and a tech entrepreneur executive experience that Mark has really made an insanely strong leadership team as we assessed the vision for the next five years."