5U AI: From football to agentic AI freight start-up

World Cup year, 2026 is also broadly being framed as The Year of the AI Agent – one that will see a shift from stand-alone proof-of-concept pilots just testing the waters, to actually training and embedding AI agents into daily business processes. And not just single agents working on automated individual tasks, but an intelligent team of multiple specialized agents collaborating on complex workflows, while ensuring human judgment is called in at critical decision points. This reality is already coming into play in the world of cargo – in particular, through a German start-up founded last year by Technical University of Munich graduates, Yagiz Abik and Fehmi Sener: 5U AI is an Agentic AI specialist that is scaling up a digital workforce platform for European freight forwarding teams. It recently raised USD 3.2 million in a pre-seed funding round led by London-based Emerge Capital. 5U AI Workers are capable of managing quotes, bookings, shipment tracking, data entry and more. CargoForwarder Global put a number of questions to 5U AI’s Founder and CEO, Yagiz Abik (YA), to find out how 5U AI came about and learn more about the people behind the technology. 5U AI Team. Top left to right: Pascal Senft – Growth Associate / Max Azatian – Full Stack AI Engineer / Erhan Varlik – Founding Engineer / Tacettin Emre Bök – Software Engineer / Merve Abik – Marketing and Sales. BOTTOM left to right: Fehmi Sener – Co-founder/CTO / Yagiz Abik – Co-founder/CEO – image: courtesy 5U AI CFG: How did the idea for 5U AI come about? YA: I’ve been a physical-trade guy since the day I opened my eyes. At 18, I was importing consumer electronics from Shenzhen and selling them across Turkey – my first contact with freight was as a customer. Later, I worked at a B2B trade startup in Hamburg, where part of my day was chasing logistics companies about orders. By mid-2025, AI models had reached the point where agents could genuinely do work, and we knew that window wouldn’t stay open long. Our thesis was simple: agents only create real value if you go deep into one industry. So, we did dozens of discovery calls with logistics operators and visited their offices. Everywhere, the same picture: two screens – email on one, a 20-year-old transport management system on the other – and people copy-pasting between them all day. Up to 70% of forwarding work is repetitive like that. An industry that runs on email and phone calls is exactly where AI agents belong. And honestly, we fell in love with the people. You cold-call a forwarder and they talk to you like they’ve known you for five years. I wanted to love my customers – these are my people. CFG: How did you and Fehmi meet and decide to found the company? YA: On a football pitch. We became friends at the Technical University of Munich – Fehmi organizes one of Munich’s biggest amateur football communities, about 150 players, matches every week. We always wanted to be on the same team, and before and after every game we talked about what we could build together. Fehmi was an engineer at BMW and, in his own words, the job was too easy for him. He also knew logistics: he wrote his graduation thesis with CEVA Logistics on machine learning and had worked with their road freight department. When I came to him with the 5U idea, a first prototype and pilot customers already lined up, he didn’t blink. He quit BMW and we started in late 2025. He’s the strongest technical mind I’ve ever met. People call us yin and yang: my urgency, his calm. CFG: What does 5U stand for? YA: Look closely at our logo – it’s a multi-agent system. That’s the name. We’re building the first multi-agent AI system of its kind for freight: no single AI can run logistics end-to-end. One quotation alone touches carrier rates, margin rules, customer preferences, the TMS, and sometimes a colleague who has to clarify a surcharge. Our agents communicate with each other to get the job done, the way a team of colleagues does – and bringing that to freight is exactly what 5U stands for. CFG: How are the AI agents trained for operational tasks across air, sea and road? YA: On real freight. Our AI Workers run on a combination of frontier models and small, specialized open-source models. Because we’ve found that a specialized small model often beats a generic one at narrow tasks: reading a rate sheet, extracting shipment data from a messy PDF, classifying what an email thread is actually about. The training material is the industry’s operational reality across air, sea and road, and it’s multi-modal by nature – emails, carrier documents, rate sheets, TMS entries, phone calls. Industry professionals annotate real cases for us to create ground truth: what the correct quotation, booking or invoice match actually looks like. Every model and every change then runs through our evaluation platform, which simulates thousands of freight scenarios – an expired surcharge, a customs broker joining a thread halfway, a rush request at midnight – and scores the