Anteam has been named a winner of the Department for Transport's Freight Innovation Fund, Fourth Round, Phase 2, as confirmed on the government's list of winning projects. The award brings £130,000 in funding to trial real-time freight capacity matching with two logistics partners: Welch Group and Baxter Freight.

The government's own description of the funded project reads: "Our AI platform matches underutilised or empty transport space with real-time logistics demand, enabling freight operators to share their logistics capacity to reduce miles on the road for smarter, more sustainable operations."

£130k
Freight Innovation Fund Award, DfT
Awarded to trial AI-matched freight capacity sharing with Welch Group and Baxter Freight, addressing HGV empty running, which the Department for Transport puts at around 30% of total road freight mileage.

What the Trial Targets

The funding round's own published goals for AI-matched deliveries are substantial: up to an 85% reduction in CO2 emissions per matched delivery, up to 60% lower costs, and a 15 to 40% improvement in fleet utilisation. These are the ambitions set out for the funded trial, distinct from the results Anteam has already measured in live deployment with Baxter Freight, which we cover separately.

Empty and under-utilised HGV capacity is a stubborn problem: government figures cited in the award put it at around 30% of all road freight mileage, largely because freight demand is directional and uneven, and matching a live order to a truck already on the road is a real-time problem that doesn't scale well by phone and spreadsheet.

Why This Matters

A competitive government fund is a useful, independent signal: it means the underlying approach, matching live freight demand to space that already exists on the road, was assessed against other applicants and judged worth backing. It also brings in two named logistics partners, Welch Group and Baxter Freight, to trial the platform against real freight networks rather than synthetic data.

Anteam Reload™ is the product this funding builds on: it matches live orders to a fleet's existing routes and calculates the detour automatically. Read about the trial's measured results, including a ministerial visit to see them first-hand, in our write-up of the Baxter Freight trial.