YunYou Freight Announces Completion of Tens of Millions of Dollars in Series B+ Funding, Led by 5Y Capital | 5Y News
Let every individual operate more efficiently within an ordered, high-performing network.
YunYou Freight recently announced the completion of a Series B+ round of financing worth tens of millions of dollars, led by 5Y Capital, with BlueRun Ventures and Haochen Capital participating, and Xingyun Capital serving as exclusive financial advisor.
Jilong Zhou
Founder, YunYou Freight
Q1
Why did you found YunYou Freight?
Jilong Zhou: Logistics is the infrastructure of the entire economy — a massive market. Though somewhat distant from ordinary people's daily lives, it is intimately connected to everyone's work and life. Within this market, individual truck drivers have always been the fundamental building blocks of this enormous service industry. They are vast in number and highly fragmented, occupying a consistently weak position in negotiations with enterprises and freight carriers. In recent years, as economic growth has slowed and logistics services have become increasingly commoditized, the industry has descended into brutal price competition. Because individual drivers are so vulnerable, they often end up being the ones squeezed. We hope to use algorithms and technology to optimize the industry's cost-profit model, so that shippers receive quality service and every truck driver can live with dignity.
Q2
What are YunYou Freight's advantages in this space?
Jilong Zhou: YunYou Freight is an algorithm-driven logistics technology company. After connecting massive numbers of shippers and drivers, we use algorithms to form an efficient dispatch and optimization network, enabling every individual participant to improve their operational efficiency within an orderly, high-efficiency system. YunYou Freight's dispatch algorithms are quite similar to Meituan's delivery algorithms — both ultimately aim to maximize the efficiency of individual capacity within the overall network, thereby better serving shippers or consumers.
Q3
How is YunYou Freight able to significantly reduce per-kilometer operating costs?
Jilong Zhou: YunYou Freight mainly helps individual drivers increase their income and optimize their cost-profit model through three approaches: increasing mileage, reducing toll fees, and lowering fuel costs. YunYou helps individual drivers break through the limitations of finding orders on their own, enabling them to access more suitable orders. We drastically reduce waiting time during pickup, loading, and unloading, use route planning to optimally allocate highway and national road segments, and lower fuel costs through collective purchasing — achieving a 30-40% reduction in per-kilometer operating costs compared to industry averages.
Xiao Zhou
Vice President, 5Y Capital
Q1
Why invest in YunYou Freight?
Xiao Zhou: Logistics is a cost center for all industries — a massive market — and logistics costs directly determine a company's profit model. Recently, slowing economic growth, rising raw material prices, and weak consumption have pushed many industries into "stagflation." The industry's cost-profit model urgently needs to be transformed, and a massive, collaboratively operated full-truckload freight network is poised to emerge.
Q2
What are the major variables happening in full-truckload freight today?
Xiao Zhou: The essence of logistics is simple — only two things matter: scale and efficiency. YunYou faces enormous opportunities and variables on both fronts. On the scale side, YunYou uses AI technology and WeChat Work to help sales teams quickly acquire and close deals, achieving sales efficiency 100x higher than traditional logistics companies' ground teams — finding a path to rapid scaling at lower cost. On the efficiency side, the original market was a bilaterally asymmetric one due to the extreme fragmentation of both shippers and drivers, creating massive information friction and cost. YunYou uses a set of optimization algorithms to transform this asymmetric market into an orderly, symmetric one, dramatically reducing costs and improving driver income levels.
Q3
Many multi-billion-dollar companies have already emerged in logistics. Why bet on this sector now?
Xiao Zhou: Logistics actually has many layers. By shipment weight, it can be divided into urban delivery, express, less-than-truckload (LTL), and full-truckload (FTL) — each is a distinct market. In the FTL space, Full Truck Alliance is essentially the only internet company attempting digital freight matching. Because the FTL market serves enterprise clients with certain delivery standards and costs, the market splits into "new truck" and "familiar truck" segments. Full Truck Alliance optimizes matching efficiency, mainly serving the "new truck" market. YunYou targets dispatch efficiency, mainly serving the "familiar truck" market.
YunYou Freight is a smart logistics solution provider whose core business is self-operated dedicated fleets powered by AI algorithms. This financing round will accelerate the transition from self-operated to open-platform models.
Founder Jilong Zhou graduated from Peking University and previously worked at Deutsche Bank, McKinsey & Company, and CICC. Team members come from leading hedge fund PAG, Huochebang (Truck Alliance), Deppon Logistics, Lionbridge Group, Alibaba, Meituan, and other companies, with degrees from Peking University, Tsinghua University, Harvard University, ETH Zurich, and other renowned institutions — bringing combined expertise in algorithms, logistics, and internet technology. YunYou Freight has previously received cumulative investment of hundreds of millions of yuan from BlueRun Ventures, Xintian Capital, Tencent, Joy Capital, Eastern Bell Capital, and other institutions.
The B2B transportation market that YunYou Freight focuses on is worth 3 trillion yuan, with both supply and demand sides highly fragmented. Cost reduction and efficiency improvement are the biggest pain points for all participants in the logistics ecosystem. On the supply side, the market consists almost entirely of individual drivers without fleet-based or organized capacity, resulting in poor service reliability; vehicle organization, dispatch, and load matching rely on manual processes and experience. On the demand side, shippers want to further reduce costs, but squeezing costs through existing operating methods has reached its limit — the industry needs new approaches to efficiency gains.
Starting with self-operated dedicated fleets, YunYou Freight has deeply developed algorithm-driven cost reduction and efficiency improvement, and has now achieved the lowest transportation costs between any two points in the market, with average per-vehicle operating efficiency and net income improved by 60-70%. The company's technical team employs an elastic cloud-based distributed computing architecture for real-time analysis of large-scale data, with core technologies including intelligent real-time dispatch, dynamic pricing strategy, and optimal route selection. Digitizing the entire transportation process, it has independently developed multiple fusion algorithms, machine learning, and operations research-powered "smart logistics central brain" to address load matching, route planning, and vehicle dispatch in typical logistics scenarios. Currently, YunYou's self-operated dedicated fleets significantly outperform individual vehicles in mileage efficiency, empty-mile rate, and fuel-plus-toll costs — reaching industry-leading levels.
After maturing its "AI-driven smart fleet" business, YunYou is now attempting to empower both B-side and C-side participants in the logistics market with its algorithm-driven efficiency capabilities. On the C-side, YunYou has already connected with hundreds of thousands of individual vehicles, using recommendation algorithms and NLP technology to achieve precise and efficient user reach, facilitating transactions. On the B-side, YunYou is packaging various self-developed tools and capabilities to empower logistics enterprises, helping them improve efficiency in fleet management, cost reduction, and capital management — enabling them to run their logistics business better.
YunYou Freight's business is currently growing at a pace of doubling every two months, with a refined city-expansion model, upgraded talent system, and robust technical architecture supporting rapid scaling.
5Y Capital (formerly Morningside Venture Capital) currently manages approximately RMB 32 billion in USD and RMB dual-currency funds. 5Y Capital seeks out, supports, and inspires entrepreneurs who are willing to go it alone, providing them with support ranging from spiritual backing to full operational assistance. We believe that if the "crazy" you in others' eyes begins to be believed in, the world will become a different place.
BEIJING · SHANGHAI · SHENZHEN · HONG KONG
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