The warehouse floor never leaves you. Hall learned this at Logistics Planning Services, the 3PL he ran for a decade out of Saint Paul, Minnesota. The company chased its own tail of emails, paper trails, phone tags, and margin-crushing inefficiency — and somehow still landed on the Inc. 500/5000 list five times. He knew what the waste looked like from the inside. He also knew nobody had fixed it.
His résumé before Augment reads like a survey of how freight actually gets moved in America: president at LPS (acquired by GlobalTranz), Chief Customer Officer at YRC Worldwide — a $5 billion public LTL and brokerage operation — then CEO at PRIMO Logistics, then Executive in Residence at 8VC focused on supply chain investments. Each role a closer look at the same stubborn industry problem: logistics runs on people chasing information, not on information finding people.
After 25 years in logistics — running 3PLs, fleets and tech companies — I've seen so much waste in this industry drain time, crush morale and limit margins. That's why we built Augie.
Justin Hall, Co-Founder & CCO, Augment
When Harish Abbott — the Deliverr co-founder who sold that company to Shopify for $2.1 billion — called with the idea for an AI teammate built specifically for logistics operators, Hall didn't deliberate long. The pitch was simple and pointed: what if the AI handled the phone calls, the emails, the shipment coordination, the invoice chasing? What if the broker could just broker?
Hall committed almost immediately. Together with Abbott and Artur Rivilis (former VP of Engineering at Shopify), he co-founded Augment in 2024. The team didn't start with code — they started with people. Augment's team shadowed roughly 90 logistics professionals before writing a line of production software. That fieldwork became Augie: an AI teammate that integrates across voice, email, Slack, SMS, and Telegram to handle quoting, dispatch, load building, tracking, and invoice collection.
Hall's role as Chief Commercial Officer puts him at the front of every customer conversation — which is exactly where a 25-year industry veteran should be when selling AI to an industry that has historically been skeptical of both software and salespeople. Augment's early traction reflects the positioning: Armstrong Transport Group reported a 40% reduction in invoice delays within months of deployment, and the customer base more than doubled between the seed round in March 2025 and the Series A announcement in September.
At the SMC³ 2025 panel, Hall was direct about the competitive stakes: companies delaying AI adoption risk irreversible disadvantage within 18 months. The window, in his view, is not theoretical. It is already closing. He has seen enough industry cycles to distinguish between hype and shift — and this, he says, is a shift.
