Episode 12: Leta
Why AI Drives Logistics Efficiency @ Scale
Nick Joshi and I put in work to get this episode recorded. The life of a founder is always hectic, but it wasn’t until this TechCrunch article about Leta’s seed round came out that it became clear why it was especially so. But let’s focus on the business for a moment.
Leta uses AI to do route optimization for its clients’ fleets, saving them money and assets at the last mile. So, yes, it’s an “asset-light” approach to increasing efficiency and decreasing the costs in the part of the value chain where it’s most needed. As we learned from Kikonde Mwatela in the second episode of this series on digital commerce and logistics, last-mile distribution can be a business model killer for companies that internalize the function.
The bet that Leta, Lori, and other asset-light companies seem to be making is that using technology to boost efficiency and utilization, which means employing it to choose better routes and cargo loading approaches, will drive down the cost of moving goods, and by extension, the cost of those goods.
Leta is operating at the last mile with aspirations to move to the middle and first; Lori is working at the first mile; and Paps (featured in the previous episode), is operating across the value chain. With the “mostly technology, little to no assets” approach being deployed across all three companies in the same or complementary geographies—it’ll be interesting to see if and when they converge.
So, check out the episode, but until then, here are a few highlights from my conversation with Nick:
💎 1. Efficiency at scale boosts value and margins.
Leta’s AI-driven platform turns efficiencies into compounding cost savings for high-volume enterprise clients.
“If you're doing 5, 10, 15,000 trips a day, particularly [at] the scale of the companies and businesses we work with—the KFCs and the Diageos—the saving is huge.”
🧠 2. AI is an optimization engine.
AI helps Leta predict, plan, and deliver better, faster, and cheaper for its customers at the last mile, the least efficient part of the value chain.
“AI is actually saying, [it] recommend[s] using this truck or this asset or taking this route to avoid this road at this time.”
🧩 3. Deep integration creates high switching costs.
By integrating with ERPs like SAP, Leta embeds into its customer workflows, improving visibility and making offboarding difficult—turning infrastructure into a moat.
“The fact that we've built out all of the major integrations and can connect to everyone's kind of core systems makes it very difficult to off-board and find another solution and integrate and get going….I would say that the switching costs are super high.”
🚀 4. Growth comes from scaling with sector leaders.
Rather than chasing geographic expansion, Leta’s strategy is to grow alongside large enterprise customers into new markets—ensuring capital efficiency and defensibility.
“If we do a great job for you and you love our technology and solution in one market, how do we get your other markets involved? Right? How do we scale with you that way?”
💸 5. Efficiency that becomes cost savings can be monetized.
Leta earns a share of the cost savings it generates—aligning its revenue model directly with customer efficiency gains.
“What we do is a calculation to say, look, you were using 75 trucks to deliver goods before using Leta. You're now using 55 and therefore you're saving 20 trucks and we take a percentage of that saving.”
This week’s run-down? Done. See you next week for the last one in the series!