In addition to being two of the world’s richest people, billionaire business leaders, and Seattle residents, Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos are now also investors in a startup called Convoy.
The Seattle-based trucking service matches drivers and carriers with shipping jobs as a sort of Uber for trucking, Bloomberg reports. Convoy announced a new set of $62 million in funding from Gates’s Cascade Investment and others. The company has raised $80 million since it began in 2015.
Gates joins Bezos, who began investing in the company in 2015, and other prominent business leaders like Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff and eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, among others backing Convoy.
Uber recently began competing with the startup by launching its own Uber Freight service, which matches carriers with shippers. But Convoy’s latest investments show an eagerness for the company to continue to expand as competition grows.
Meanwhile, Uber is still in search of a new CEO a month after Uber founder Travis Kalanick stepped down from the position as the company faced a number of issues ranging from sexual harassment allegations to legal disputes with rival firms like Waymo.
And Convoy is trying to make the best of a difficult time for its competitor, CEO Dan Lewis told Bloomberg.
“It isn’t clear what’s going to happen with Uber,” Lewis said. “The leadership of the company in general is gone.”
