5U AI raises $3.2M Pre-Seed to build AI workers for European freight forwarders

5U AI (Munich) has raised $3.2 million / approximately €2.9 million in a Pre-Seed round led by Emerge Capital (London), with angel participation from senior former executives across DHL, GEODIS, DSV, Maersk, and Ceva Logistics. The company was founded in 2025 by Yagiz Abik (CEO) and Fehmi Şener, both graduates of the Technical University of Munich. Its product is already live with TCI International Logistics across air and ocean freight operations.

AI Workers for freight forwarding

The freight forwarding industry coordinates the movement of goods across air, sea, and road on behalf of manufacturers, retailers, and distributors. The operational mechanics — quoting carriers, booking shipments, tracking status across multiple parties, reconciling invoices, managing exceptions — are highly repeatable but individually judgment-intensive: each task involves interpreting documents, applying commercial rules, and making decisions that depend on accumulated institutional knowledge.

5U AI's answer is AI Workers: autonomous agents configured for specific freight forwarding tasks, trained on logistics-domain knowledge, and deployed within existing team workflows. An AI Worker can generate quotes across carriers, log bookings, track shipment status in real time, and reconcile invoice discrepancies without human hand-holding. The integration layer connects to customers' existing carrier portals and TMS systems rather than requiring a migration.

The component that 5U AI claims as a structural differentiator is the Context Layer: a mechanism that records the reasoning behind every AI Worker decision, not just the output. If an AI Worker resolves a customs exception in a particular way, the Context Layer stores the logic — making that judgment reusable and searchable by future AI Workers handling similar cases. The claim is that the platform compounds: the more decisions flow through it, the more institutional knowledge it captures, and the harder it becomes to replicate without the history.

The operator-angel syndicate

Alongside Emerge Capital, 5U AI has secured angel investment from senior executives with direct operational experience across the five largest logistics conglomerates in Europe. Their names are not disclosed publicly, but the institutions — DHL, GEODIS, DSV, Maersk, Ceva — represent a meaningful fraction of the European freight forwarding market by volume.

"Freight forwarding is full of decisions still trapped in inboxes, spreadsheets, and people's heads," said Yagiz Abik. "We're not building another chatbot that answers questions and disappears — we're building AI Workers that understand freight operations, carry out the work, and capture the reasoning behind every decision, so teams can scale their knowledge as well as their capacity."

The $3.2 million funds product development, a European go-to-market push, and hiring across product, engineering, and commercial functions. With TCI International Logistics already live, the next milestone is expanding from the early customer to a commercial replication pattern: the same AI Workers, deployed in a second and third forwarder, producing measurable throughput gains that validate the platform rather than the pilot.