Founder & CEO / Carpool Logistics
Michael Malakhov
He looked at a car hauler rolling down I-85 half-empty and saw a business hiding in the gaps.
Michael Malakhov. The man behind the empty-seat economy of car shipping.
He looked at a car hauler rolling down I-85 half-empty and saw a business hiding in the gaps.
Most people never think about how a used car gets from a Phoenix auction to a Charlotte dealership. Michael Malakhov thinks about almost nothing else. His company, Carpool Logistics, does something disarmingly simple: it treats cars like passengers who share a ride. Fill the empty slots on a hauler, bundle the routes, drop the cost, cut the emissions. The name is not a metaphor. It is the whole idea.
Today Carpool is a 70-person company in Atlanta's Buckhead tech corridor that has moved more than 150,000 vehicles for over 1,800 clients - auto auctions, dealerships, manufacturers, and fleets. In March 2025 it raised a $12 million Series A led by Wavecrest Growth Partners, with a strategic check from CarMax, one of the largest used-car retailers in the country. Not bad for a business built on the space between two parked cars.
Carpool did not appear out of nowhere. Malakhov spent nearly two decades learning how things move. He joined C.H. Robinson as a sales associate and stayed 16 years, climbing to Regional General Manager, building a Southeast flatbed shipping division, and running a pallet consolidation network. At one point he crossed the Atlantic to oversee the company's European operations before returning home.
Then came a sharper focus. From 2016 to 2018 he served as Executive Vice President at ACERTUS, an automotive-logistics-as-a-service platform, where the specific pain of moving vehicles - not pallets, not flatbeds, but cars - came into view. By 2021 he had seen enough inefficiency to bet his career on fixing it. He co-founded Carpool Logistics with Eric Morris, Joe Norton, and Terrence Jackson.
The entrepreneurial itch was older than the company. A decade earlier, as an MBA student at Emory's Goizueta Business School, Malakhov attended a Venture Atlanta showcase and left inspired. Years later he walked onto that same stage to pitch Carpool. The circle closed neatly - the student became the founder.
The American dream is alive and well because I live it every day.- Michael Malakhov
Malakhov says he has lived under three political systems - a communist country, a socialist country, and the United States. That is not a talking point he trots out for investors. It is the lens he sees business through. Growing up, he believed getting ahead required the right government connections. The American version, where a person can start a company on an idea and a team, still strikes him as remarkable.
That optimism is not naive. It is earned. By November 2022, roughly a year after launch and on modest seed funding, Carpool was already clearing about $400,000 in monthly revenue. The dream, in Malakhov's telling, is not a slogan. It is a monthly P&L.
Two rounds, one trajectory. The bars below track funding raised, in millions.
Seed led by Atlanta Ventures & Overline Ventures. Series A led by Wavecrest Growth Partners with CarMax, Impel founders Devin Daly & Michael Quigley, and David Metter.
Lead with the problem, not the product. Investors back structural change and measurable execution.- Malakhov, on how to pitch
A logistics lifer's advice tends to be blunt, practical, and short on theory. Here is Malakhov's, in his own words.
"Execution comes from the team. Investors don't just look at the idea - they look at whether you have the right people." He hires A players and refuses to settle.
"Building a business is all about iteration and constant improvement." Ship, learn, adjust - the same logic he applies to routes, applied to companies.
Relationships open the door, but the follow-up closes it. "Venture Atlanta helps you make initial connections, but it's the follow-up that matters."
Carpool cut its teeth moving cars for auto auctions. That was the beachhead, not the destination. With the Series A capital, Malakhov is steering the company into two much larger verticals: dealerships and OEMs - the original equipment manufacturers who build the cars in the first place.
The plan is not to add trucks. It is to add software. Carpool's edge is a technology platform that gives dealers, auctions, OEMs, and fleets visibility and control over transport they have never really had. Enhance the platform, expand product, optimize the network, scale the sales team. The empty-seat economy, it turns out, has a lot of seats left to fill.
Developing people is my most rewarding part. I love seeing people grow.- Michael Malakhov
Mike Malakhov on Carpool Logistics and the future of vehicle shipping.
▶ Play the interview on YouTube