Sennder closes C.H. Robinson Europe deal, becomes a top-5 FTL player

Sennder Technologies has completed its purchase of C.H. Robinson's European Surface Transportation business, clearing the last regulatory hurdles roughly six months after the deal was first agreed. The Berlin-based digital freight forwarder said the combined company now ranks among the top five full truck load operators in Europe, with €1.4bn in combined revenue and about 1,700 employees spread across more than 20 locations.

The closing, confirmed in February, turns a deal struck in July 2024 into an operating reality. For a company built around software that matches shippers with independent truckers, swallowing a large, people-heavy legacy business from an American logistics group is the harder part of the story than the signing itself.

Why C.H. Robinson sold

C.H. Robinson's decision to exit Europe tracks a broader retreat by the Minnesota-based broker, which has spent the past two years tightening its focus on North American truckload and less-than-truckload freight, plus its global ocean and air operations. The company's headcount had already shrunk by more than 11% as a prolonged freight downturn squeezed margins across the industry.

At the time the deal was announced, C.H. Robinson's chief executive, Dave Bozeman, said the business needed to "focus on what sets us apart and build upon our competitive advantages." That framing points to a brokerage retrenching to its most profitable lanes rather than one in crisis, but it still marks a retreat from a continent where it had operated for years.

Neither side disclosed the purchase price. Sennder said at signing that it did not plan immediate organisational changes to the acquired business, a sign that integration would be managed gradually rather than through an abrupt restructuring.

Another rung in a buy-and-build strategy

This is not sennder's first acquisition. The company, founded in Berlin in 2015 by David Nothacker and co-founders, previously bought Uber's European freight operations and the smaller carrier network Cars&Cargo as it built out capacity across the continent. Sennder has said it intends to keep buying local road freight companies to add trucking supply and thicken its network density.

That ambition puts sennder in direct competition with established incumbents such as DB Schenker and DHL, as well as other digital forwarders trying to digitise a famously fragmented industry. Road freight in Europe remains dominated by small, independent haulage firms, which is precisely the inefficiency sennder's matching platform and AI-based planning tools are built to address.

The company has raised more than €300m from backers including Scania, Accel and Project A, and was last valued above $1bn. Folding in a business the size of C.H. Robinson's European arm is a different kind of bet: it pushes sennder's scale up sharply, but it also brings legacy processes, contracts and staff that need to be absorbed into its own technology stack.

"We need to focus on what sets us apart and build upon our competitive advantages," Dave Bozeman, C.H. Robinson's chief executive, said of the sale.

What comes next

Nothacker has described the integration itself, not the deal, as the real test, pointing to the work of merging systems and teams across more than 20 countries. For sennder, the payoff of reaching €1.4bn in combined revenue only shows up if it can convert that scale into margin in a freight market that has been soft for several years running.

The deal also illustrates a wider pattern in European logistics: as US-based brokers pull back from the continent, homegrown digital platforms are stepping in to consolidate capacity rather than waiting for the market to recover on its own. Whether sennder can turn an acquired, largely analogue business into a digitally run one at speed will shape how much of that €1.4bn in combined revenue eventually reaches the bottom line.