Matt McKinney

Somewhere inside Uber's freight division, a data science manager named Matt McKinney was staring at a problem that looked like accounting but smelled like infrastructure. Every time a truck crossed a border, made a delivery, added a fuel surcharge, or triggered a rate discrepancy, a bill appeared. Sometimes the bill was wrong. In fact, 20% of the time, it was wrong. And fixing it took 50 days. Per invoice. For an industry moving trillions of dollars annually.

McKinney and his Uber colleague Shaosu Liu didn't write a think piece about it. They started building at night. Nights and weekends, while still on Uber's payroll, they wrote the prototype that would become Loop. By May 2021, they were done waiting - they left Uber and raised a $6M seed round from Susa Ventures and 8VC within weeks.

That line explains everything about Loop's market thesis. Uber could absorb bad debt and slow payments because it had the engineering firepower to monitor, detect, and dispute. Its customers - the shippers, the carriers, the brokers - couldn't. McKinney's insight was that this wasn't a niche payments problem. It was a structural absence of intelligence inside the supply chain's financial layer.

Loop's fix wasn't to build a better spreadsheet. It was to build what McKinney calls a Logistics Data Platform - a full-stack AI system that ingests the dark, unstructured data buried in freight bills, contracts, carrier documents, and EDI feeds, then transforms it into actionable financial intelligence. The proprietary technology behind this is Loop's DUX system: document, data, and domain understanding models trained specifically for logistics.

What made the fundraising story unusual wasn't just the speed - $172M across four rounds in five years. It was the company. Loop's Series B brought in J.P. Morgan Growth Equity and Index Ventures. The Series C, announced in April 2026, was led by Valor Equity Partners, with every prior institutional investor doubling down. That kind of continuation is rare. It means the investors who got close enough to see the numbers liked what they saw.

Two of McKinney's Series B investors - Luke Sikora from J.P. Morgan and Damir Becirovic from Index Ventures - knew him from USC. They had been college friends. The supply chain's $95M check had alumni network roots. That's not a coincidence. It's a story about what happens when someone with a technical mind, an operator's instincts, and a twenty-year-old friendship invests in a problem no one thinks is worth solving.

McKinney graduated from USC's Viterbi School of Engineering in 2013 with a degree in Industrial and Systems Engineering. Then Stanford's Management Science & Engineering graduate certificate. Then Datalot, Platform Science, and 171 Design Group - his product design consultancy. Then Uber. Then Loop. The career arc is not a straight line. It's a systems engineer tracing the inefficiency until he found the one worth building a company around.

Loop's most significant expansion move came with its acquisitions: Data2Logistics and StrategIQ Commerce. These weren't acqui-hires for engineers. They were strategic expansions into parcel management, real-time visibility, and global payment execution - broadening Loop from a freight audit tool into what looks increasingly like a supply chain financial operating system.

Customers like Olipop, Kendra Scott, Clemens Food Group, Dot Foods, and Outset Medical use Loop not because freight audit is glamorous - it isn't - but because the margin impact is real. Loop's pitch is simple: the money is already there, trapped inside invoices, trapped in disputes, trapped in 50-day payment cycles. Loop just gets it out.

Outside the office, McKinney runs and bikes. He has two sons. He has the energy of someone who picked a problem they actually believe in - not a trend, not a wave, but a structural dysfunction that pre-dates the internet and will outlast most startups that try to fix it. Loop is still here. McKinney shows no sign of going anywhere.

That's the kind of line that reads as a cliche until you consider what "what I do" actually means: auditing the most tedious invoice in global commerce, convincing Fortune 500 logistics teams to rip out legacy systems, and raising $172M from some of the world's most rigorous institutional investors. If that's his idea of fun, the supply chain should feel lucky.