Thursday, October 22, 2026
The news that moves freight
Companies & Markets Oct 22, 2026 · 7 min read

sennder reaches profit on a smaller business than it promised

sennder is profitable at €1bn, not the €1.4bn it promised. sennder, the German digital road freight broker, said on 21 October it expects about €1bn revenue in 2026 and is on track for a full year of positive IFRS EBITDA, a standard profit measure. Our view: sennder got to profit by getting smaller. When it agreed to buy C.H. Robinson’s European road business in July 2024, its CEO said the deal would double revenue to €1.4bn. It also claims gross profit per operator rose 45%. Our take for forwarders: expect sennder to drop low-margin loads, not chase them. Our call: its 2026 revenue lands between €0.95bn and €1.05bn.

sennder hits profit and €1bn, but the merger was meant to make €1.4bn

sennder, the German digital road freight broker, said on 21 October 2026 that it expects about €1bn revenue this year. It also said it is on track for a full year of profit on IFRS EBITDA. That stands for earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation, measured under international accounting rules. It is the profit figure most growth companies point to first.

The Loadstar reports that sennder “has turned IFRS EBITDA positive on an unadjusted monthly basis”. Unadjusted means no one-off costs were stripped out. At the same time, sennder said it has finished moving C.H. Robinson’s former European road business onto its own software platform, sennOS. The two companies now run as one.

Our view: this is a real milestone, but it is a profit story, not a growth story. sennder got to break-even by getting smaller and more selective. Forwarders who buy or sell European full-truckload capacity should read it that way.

What sennder announced

The figures come from sennder’s own announcement, as reported by EU-Startups on 21 October. sennder moves more than 150,000 shipments a month through more than 40,000 vetted carriers. It has raised more than €340m since it was founded.

The headline efficiency number is gross profit per operator. Gross profit is what a broker keeps after paying the trucker. An operator is a staff member who books and manages loads. EU-Startups writes: “Operator productivity, measured as gross profit per operator, rose 45% YoY.” It adds that “sennder attributes the increase to scale, the single integrated platform and its growing use of reasoning AI agents”. These are software tools that help staff with load matching, pricing and fixing problems.

David Nothacker, co-founder and CEO, said: “We brought two large businesses onto one platform and lifted operator productivity by 45% in the process”. He also said: “Continued operational momentum and sustained profitability puts us in an even stronger position to invest in the digital transformation of freight”.

The Loadstar says sennder credits the result to a sharper focus on its core business, strategic portfolio optimisation and better efficiency. According to EU-Startups, sennder says it is putting the quality of revenue ahead of volume.

What was not published matters too. There is no EBITDA figure in euros. There is no gross profit total. There is no headcount. That means the 45% could come from more gross profit, fewer operators, or both. We cannot tell which from what sennder released.

The €1.4bn that became €1bn

sennder has grown by buying before. In 2020 it took over Uber Freight’s European business in an all-stock deal, which TechCrunch said was rumoured at about €900m. In June 2021 it raised an $80m extension to its Series D funding round, led by Baillie Gifford. FreightWaves reported that this valued the company at more than $1bn, making it a unicorn, the term for a startup valued at $1bn or more. At the time Nothacker said “the additional funds give us the flexibility to capitalize on the right opportunities.” The next big opportunity was a much larger one.

Go back to July 2024. sennder agreed to buy C.H. Robinson’s European Surface Transportation business. That is the US group’s European road freight arm. TechCrunch reported on 30 July 2024 that each business had about €700m in revenue. Börsen-Zeitung, carrying a Reuters report the same day, quoted Nothacker saying the deal would double sennder’s revenue to €1.4bn. The deal was paid fully in cash, and the price was not disclosed.

The deal closed on 1 February 2025, according to C.H. Robinson. sennder said at the time that the combined group would be a top-five full-truckload player in Europe, with about 1,600 staff in more than 20 locations. Full truckload, or FTL, means one shipper’s goods fill a whole trailer.

Two years after that €1.4bn claim, the combined business expects about €1bn. That is roughly 29% below what the deal was meant to create.

You might put that down to a weak market. But road freight prices in Europe have gone up. The European Road Freight Rate Benchmark from Ti, Upply and IRU put the contract rate index at 148.0 in Q2 2026. That is 15.2 points higher than a year earlier, according to trans.info. The spot index, which tracks one-off bookings, was up 13.9 points. A broker’s revenue is mostly the freight price it passes on to the trucker. When rates rise, revenue should rise even if volume stays flat.

So in our view the volume sennder carries has shrunk by more than the 29% revenue gap suggests. Some of that will be loads lost in any merger, as customers spread their risk. Some of it, judging by sennder’s own talk of portfolio optimisation, was dropped on purpose. In our reading, that is how it reached profit: it cut work that did not pay.

Why the market helped

Rising rates do not only lift revenue. They can lift a broker’s margin too, if contract prices move faster than what it pays carriers. The Q2 benchmark showed the opposite pattern for spot work. trans.info notes that European spot rates grew almost twice as fast as contract rates in the quarter. A broker squeezed between fixed contract prices and rising spot costs usually loses money. sennder made money anyway, which suggests its customer contracts have been repriced, or that it has stopped taking loads it cannot cover.

Demand did not help. The same benchmark shows road traffic among the main EU economies down 1.6% year on year. Germany to France was down 3.9%. Spain to France was down 3.6%. Germany to Poland was up 1.5%. VerkehrsRundschau, reporting the IRU study on 13 August, said long-haul trucking costs rose about 10% in a year. EU diesel averaged €1.94 a litre in Q2, 27% higher than a year before, according to trans.info.

The analysts behind the benchmark expect rates to stay high in the second half of 2026, VerkehrsRundschau reported. That is good for a broker that has fixed its pricing. It is hard for one still locked into old contracts.

What it means for forwarders and shippers

First, sennder is now a disciplined competitor, not a cheap one. A loss-making digital broker can buy market share with low prices. A profitable one that talks about revenue quality is less likely to. In our view, forwarders bidding against sennder for European FTL work in 2027 contracts should expect fewer silly prices from it. That is good news for anyone who has lost tenders to it on price.

Second, shippers should not lean on one broker for key lanes. If sennder is shedding low-margin loads, some customers will find their lanes dropped or repriced at renewal. Having a second broker or a forwarder with its own carrier pool on each key lane is cheap insurance.

Third, the AI claim is worth watching but not yet proven. “Reasoning AI agents” is sennder’s phrase. The only number tied to it is the 45% gain in gross profit per operator, and that number does not separate the effect of software from the effect of merging two staffs and cutting overlap. Forwarders weighing their own automation should ask vendors for the same metric, gross profit per head, with the headcount shown.

Fourth, profit gives sennder room to buy. In 2024 Nothacker told TechCrunch: “As of today, we do not need another round of financing for the time being”. Now he says profitability puts it in a stronger position to invest. In our view, smaller European road brokers with good carrier networks but weak software are the obvious targets. Expect sennder to look at them.

Fifth, lanes. Of the three lanes trans.info gives volume figures for, Germany to Poland is the only one rising. Our expectation is that profit-focused brokers like sennder will chase volume where demand is real, and price defensively on the falling Germany to France and Spain to France flows.

Our call

We think sennder has fixed its costs but not yet proven it can grow again.

Our prediction: when sennder gives its 2026 full-year figures, most likely in Q1 2027, revenue will land between €0.95bn and €1.05bn. It will confirm positive full-year IFRS EBITDA but will still not publish the EBITDA figure in euros. We also expect it to announce at least one acquisition in European road freight by the end of 2027.

Sources