FreightWeb: Opening a New Chapter in Shipping Partial Truckloads

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Will Payson, CEO & Founder

Trucking in the U.S. is an 800+ Bn dollar industry, and transports over 70 percent of all the freight in the country. However, data from the federal weigh stations along the U.S. highways presents a grim reality: a quarter of all trucks driving on U.S. roads are empty at any given time, carrying no cargo at all. Perhaps even more strikingly, another half of the trucks on the road at any given time are “loaded” but are less than half full by weight. For a country that spends nearly five percent of its GDP in trucking, this means wasted transportation costs for U.S. shippers and consumers over $100B per year. The root cause of this inefficiency is directly attributed to shippers buying full trucks when they don't need them, and struggling to fully use the full truckload movements that they buy. There's a lot of opportunities to create a much cleaner, more efficient trucking industry, but until now there hasn't been a viable, scalable, and go-to solution that is purpose-built for managing partial shipments.

FreightWeb is here to change that.

"Our goal is to solve what has been a long-standing problem in the industry by working with both direct shippers and 3PLs," says Will Payson, co-founder & CEO of FreightWeb.

Traditionally, buying the whole truckload has been the easy way out for shippers and agents, who were troubled with the ordeal of arranging for a good solution for their partial truckload shipments—which are typically between 6 and 20 pallets (or 12 to 40 linear feet of truck). First off, shippers could not always succeed at making arrangements to consolidate their shipments with other partial freight shippers. Another challenge was that getting a rate quote from Less-than-truckload carriers (LTL) and brokers could take hours, and in some cases more than a day. Both cases required the shippers and brokers to know the right people to talk to and have patience. To top it off, they couldn't even be certain about the outcomes.

FreightWeb turns this scenario in favor of shippers and brokers. "Shippers can go to our website—myfreightweb. com—and register in a couple of minutes to get a real quote, whether it's for half a truck or a quarter or a full truck," says Payson. "We will give you a firm price for the shipment on the spot," he adds. Interestingly, FreightWeb is the only company in the U.S. that does this. The solution directly results in more than 25 percent savings in the shipment cost for shippers, making the trucking economy and transportation more efficient. FreightWeb is expanding the reach of its solution by partnering with leading players in the industry who can leverage its solution via APIs to automate Partial Truckload rate quoting and shipping.

Farah Ali, Co-founder & CTO

The company has also filed a patent for an innovative Pallet-Rack solution that can dramatically improve the efficiency of loading a trailer while protecting the freight in transit. A video of the Pallet Rack in operation is posted on FreightWeb’s blog on: https://www. myfreightweb.com/blog. The pallet rack system provides shippers with the efficiency of labor intensive (and hard to manage) beam and decking load systems, in an easy to use modular approach. FreightWeb is now in discussion with leading carriers and top shippers to apply the technology to help improve their efficiency and reduce damages.

Our goal is to solve what has been a long-standing problem in the industry

It has just been three months since FreightWeb procured its funding as an innovative startup, and within the short span, the company has received substantial attention from the market. Payson recalls the success story of one of FreightWeb's first users, an agent representing close to 20 shippers. Prior to leveraging FreightWeb, the agent was shelling out to move partial shipments via whole trucks. The agent was also spending a considerable amount of time to figure out LTL carriers and negotiate shipments with other brokers. Partnering with Freightweb enabled him to handle partial shipments with ease while saving a lot of money. "Agents and shippers have struggled with partial truckloads because they can be time consuming and difficult to arrange and execute," says Payson. "We’ve fixed that for our customers," he adds.

The success of FreightWeb is powered by the combined experience and expertise of its co-founders. Payson, along with co-founder Farah Ali, CTO have rich experience in transportation and logistics and technology innovations. While Payson led FedEx's Operations Analysis team studying and applying data, science and new technologies for over 15 years before moving to Amazon Logistics to help them build their package delivery business, Farah drove innovations in shipping technologies for eBay as well as headed technology development at Electronic Arts. Their expertise positions FreightWeb as a company that is poised for great success—one that drives innovation in theory to practice.

Going forward, along with revolutionizing the approach toward managing partial shipments, FreightWeb is planning to roll out technology solutions for easy shipment tracking. "We have more layers of innovation in the pipeline with respect to shipments tracking and technologies that will help our customers handle freight better," says Payson.

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Company
FreightWeb

Headquarters
Seattle, WA

Management
Will Payson, CEO & Founder and Farah Ali, Co-founder & CTO

Description
FreightWeb's physical and software technologies improves efficiency by streamlining trailer loading and load matching and sourcing. FreightWeb’s products simplify trailer loading, maximize trailer capacity, and automate manual processes to match loads and capacity