Bregal Sagemount Makes Equity Investment in Transflo to Speed Product Growth

Digital freight ecosystem Transflo announced Tuesday that the growth-focused private equity firm Bregal Sagemount has made a new minority equity investment in the company, joining equity investor True Wind Capital and minority investor Carousel Capital to continue building solutions to eliminate industry inefficiencies. The terms of the deal were not disclosed.

In an interview with FreightWaves, CEO Frank Adelman described the transition and growth of Transflo, which had a document management focus and has now evolved into an ecosystem of solutions, providing tools for shippers, brokers, and carriers, ranging from billing and payment systems to electronic logging devices. 

"Transflo has evolved from, historically, a document-capturing business into an extensive supply chain platform," said Adelman. "There is so much that this vast platform is providing today compared to where it was just five years ago when True Wind invested. … We have watched our vision start to materialize as we execute on it, and I think bringing in Bregal into the equation allows us to drive hyper-growth with a firm that has really great supply chain experience. It gives us all the confidence in the world."

Phil Yates, a partner at Bregal Sagemount, echoed Adelman's sentiments.

"We are very excited for the next five years as well," said Yates in an interview with FreightWaves. "The product pipeline is full of opportunities as it relates to mobile solutions and connectivity tools. We hope the capital that True Wind allowed us to infuse into the business will both accelerate the go-to-market engine as we think about rolling out these tools and solutions. We hope to move forward with a more aggressive M&A strategy, as the team did an amazing job with the Microdea acquisition. The muscle memory and the team integration knowledge is there from that M&A perspective."

Related: Transflo expects acquisition of Microdea to speed adoption of digital document flow

Aaron Matto, the partner at True Wind Capital, believes the new partnership will help accelerate product development and innovation at Transflo seeing that Bregal Sagemount has been behind successes like Truckstop.com and Seko Logistics.

"Sagemount has clearly been very successful in transportation logistics, previously backing companies that have done incredibly well," said Matto. "We didn't want to end our tenure with Frank because we are big fans of what he is doing at Transflo. Instead of selling and walking away from it, we thought about what strategic investor we could bring on to continue to add on to the growth."

All parties agreed that this new investment will be focused on product acceleration, future M&A and increasing Transflo's payments facilitation capabilities. Transflo is now processing over $100 billion in freight spending.

Adelman was delighted to continue creating an ecosystem of solutions that allowed supply chain actors to stay agile.

"I think the ability for us to pivot and be nimble to what the market is asking from us has become a huge piece to our success," said Adelman.

"Until COVID hit, we really never received calls from shippers, and then all of a sudden they are asking us about contactless electronic bill of ladings. When we asked them how they heard of us, they said the majority of their carriers were already using our platform. It's difficult to develop technology and expect this fragmented market to embrace it, but when 80% of their freight is being moved by our customers, we were the obvious choice for those shippers," he explained.

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