Undisclosed · Other round · Transportation · Hull, UK
Image: YardOps, via the company funding announcement.
Hull-based YardOps, which develops software for coordinating vehicle movements around logistics sites, has completed an undisclosed seed-funding round at a £2.5m valuation. The company announcement says two Haatch-managed funds invested alongside York Angels.
YardOps did not disclose the round size. The Grocer reported that the investment was nearly £500k; the £2.5m figure is the company valuation, not the amount raised. Tech.eu classifies the event as Other, which maps to the Other round funding tag.
The yard becomes an operational data layer
YardOps brings booking, gatehouse traffic, shunter coordination, dock management, driver communication and trailer maintenance into one cloud platform. The company positions the software between warehouse and transport systems, where site teams often still coordinate arrivals and loading through spreadsheets, radios and separate tools. Its product pages say the platform records time-stamped events across gates, yards and docks and can pass that data to existing ERP and business-intelligence systems through APIs and exports.
The founding team says it developed the technology over six years with one of the UK’s largest food and drink companies and that the platform now runs across four of that customer’s logistics hubs. The funding announcement also says an unnamed supermarket group has signed a contract covering five UK logistics sites. These are company-reported deployments, but they give the round a concrete commercial base beyond a first pilot.
The product’s wedge is the operational gap outside the warehouse: reducing vehicle dwell time can lower leased-vehicle requirements, while a consistent record of arrivals, dock use and carrier performance can support safety reviews and resolve disputes. York Angels describes the model as running on customers’ existing hardware and being priced by trailer journey. That can tie software cost to site activity, though YardOps still has to show that configuration across different yards stays repeatable rather than becoming bespoke implementation work.
Expansion tests deployment repeatability
The new capital will fund product development, sales and marketing, senior hiring and customer growth across the UK and Europe. YardOps has also appointed former Wincanton and DHL executive Martin Dougherty as commercial director, while investor Steve Secker is joining as non-executive chair. The useful next milestone is not simply more signed sites, but faster rollouts across varied operating layouts. If the platform can reuse modules and integrations while adapting to each yard, one customer’s multi-site deployment can become a distribution reference for the next.
Sources checked:
YardOps company announcement · The Grocer reporting · York Angels portfolio · Tech.eu Funding Explorer
