Value Chain Lab lands £500K grant to match empty lorries with idle warehouses

What's the deal? Value Chain Lab has secured a £500,000 grant from Innovate UKDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → to launch FLOX, a cloud-based freight platform that matches businesses needing storage or transport with providers that have spare capacity.

Why now? Around 48.5 million square feet of prime UK warehouse space is standing empty, while goods vehicles travel a quarter of their loaded distance only partially full. FLOX aims to close that gap by pairing thousands of shippers and providers in real time.

How it works: Businesses share their needs and FLOX's matching technology pairs them with providers based on location, service, cost, and environmental impact. Its self-learning agentic AI, Wingman, handles matching and alerts, tracks stock and replenishment, and aggregates loads onto optimised routes.

What's the endgame? The platform, free to join for businesses and providers, covers ambient, chilled, and frozen warehousing, road transport, fulfilment, and inventory management across the UK. It targets underused capacity in an £85 billion freight industry.

Chief executive Michael Ostroumov said the waste in UK freight is "hiding in plain sight," adding that "the technology to solve this at scale hasn't existed until now." The grant funds development of the AI-powered matching algorithms, starting with input from shippers and providers.

What could go wrong? Real-time matching at scale is a hard computational problem existing tools have failed to crack. Adoption also depends on convincing enough businesses and providers to share capacity for the network to reach critical mass.

The signal: The £500,000 sum sits in the lower quarter of comparable rounds — modest capital for a company still building its core product. But it reflects growing pressure on logistics as customers demand faster, cheaper, and greener delivery.

Read more: Logistics Buyer

Image credit: Generated with Gemini