The first sennder office was a garage. It was late 2016, there were five employees, and the business they were building was not the one they had started with.
David Nothacker had begun it a year earlier while doing his MBA at INSEAD, and the project was about delivering parcels. That was the obvious thing to try: parcels were what people thought of when they thought of online commerce. Within months the model had to change. Parcel delivery is a crowded, low-margin game owned by giants.
Europe's road freight runs through thousands of small trucking firms, many of whom still find work by phone.
So he pivoted. He was joined by two people he knew from his earlier job at consulting firm Roland Berger, Nicolaus Schefenacker and Julius Köhler. In mid-2016 the company changed direction to full truckloads, the big trucks that haul pallets between factories, warehouses and ports. It was less glamorous and much larger.
The idea was simple to say. Europe's road freight runs through thousands of small trucking firms, many of whom still find work by phone. If software could match a shipper's load to the right truck quickly, everybody would waste fewer empty kilometres. They registered the company in Berlin, took small angel cheques in 2016, and by the end of 2017 had a partnership with Scania and about 30 people.
Then the money came, in steps. HV Capital and Project A led the Series A in early 2018, and Accel and Lakestar followed in 2019. By the end of 2019 there were 200 staff. In 2020 the company merged with the French firm Everoad and bought Uber Freight's European business, and headcount went from 300 to 700 in a single year. In early 2021 it raised 160 million dollars and passed a billion-dollar valuation.
The next chapter was about size. Sennder bought Cars&Cargo and another firm, and by mid-2022 had 1,000 employees. In 2025 it took over the European surface transportation operations of C.H. Robinson. The company now says it is profitable and expects to approach 1 billion euros in annual revenue.
The lesson is in the garage. Sennder did not win because the first idea was right. It won because the founders gave up the first idea quickly, found a boring market with real pain, and spent the next ten years buying their way up it. Giving up early is sometimes the most valuable decision a founder makes.