TL;DR At Manifold, we aggregate spot opportunities for carriers.
Hi, it's Oliver and Andrew, the co-founders of Manifold. We were early engineers at Convoy (#12 and #50) and where there until the company was acquired by Flexport last Fall. Our broad and recent experience at Convoy has given us deep insights into the complexities of the freight industry. Manifold Freight is our response to simplifying a piece of the $800 billion freight industry. Our first target market is Asset Based Carriers - a radically underserved segment..
The Underserved Large Asset-Based Carriers 🚛
Over the last decade, there has been a surge of tech investment into the freight industry (e.g., Convoy, Uber Freight) - but their focus has been maximizing the margin and capacity of smaller carriers (< 10 trucks). Medium to large Asset-Based Carriers, especially those operating with 50+ trucks, have seen minimal interest from tech despite representing more than ~60% of the U.S. truckload capacity - roughly 2,600,000 trucks! (data)
Nowhere is this more apparent than in the $100 billion spot freight market. Existing solutions don’t work well for medium and large Carriers. The spot freight market is fragmented across hundreds of load boards, thousands of brokers, and millions of shippers. For medium and large carriers, this fragmentation creates a logistical nightmare. Finding a single spot freight shipment requires a dispatcher to manually login, filter and compare each load against their fleet and availability. Sorting through thousands of emails, multiple load boards and making many time consuming phone calls.
The result? Dispatchers go the path of least resistance - large public load boards. They can’t take advantage of the much higher value, shipper direct freight because it’s physically impossible to sort through them all every day. These public load boards take an 18-30% cut of the shipment price that otherwise could have gone to the carrier. For the average medium-sized carrier doing 50 spot loads a week, this represents almost $500,000 in lost yearly revenue (2,600 shipments x $700 × 24% = $462,280).
The Manifold Solution
Manifold solves this problem by aggregating all available spot freight opportunities, including shipper direct spot freight, into one single dashboard.
Finding and bidding on quality shipper direct freight is easier with Manifold than finding low quality loads on DAT, the current industry standard.
Asks
If you have connections in the freight industry; whether they be Carriers, Brokers, or Shippers. Send them our way! We talk freight in our spare time and love it.