47. Convoy

Founders: Dan Lewis (CEO), Grant Goodale
Launched: 2015
Headquarters: Seattle
Funding: $936 million
Valuation: $3.8 billion
Key technologies: Artificial intelligence, cloud computing, deep neural networks/deep learning, Internet of Things, machine learning
Industry: Logistics
Previous appearances on Disruptor 50 List: 4 (No. 6 in 2022)

The national trucker shortage isn't a short-term pandemic labor market phenomenon.

The American Trucking Association expects a record-breaking shortage of 82,000 drivers in 2024. The industry is working on multiple fronts to address the problem, from autonomous EV trucks like those manufactured by 2023 No. 13 CNBC Disruptor company Einride, to encouraging demographic groups historically underrepresented in the industry to drive big rigs more, including women, who are entering the industry at a rate higher than ever before.

But technology to make the trucking industry — which touches 70% of freight moved across the nation — more efficient is a big part of the solution, too. Digital freight network Convoy, which grew out of Amazon roots where its co-founders previously worked — and like fellow 2023 CNBC Disruptor company Flock Freight, sees way too many trucks running at less than maximum load and efficiency. Thus, Convoy was founded to disrupt the fragmented, low-tech freight brokerage business, in which truckers and customers connected by phone and fax.

Convoy has created many products in recent years to close the gap in freight tech and make trucking networks better connected, and 2022 brought more upgrades. Convoy launched Hi-Fi Visibility, which allows carriers to access real-time visibility on trailer pools and shipments, along with analytics on facility performance, in the Convoy app.

Convoy, J.B. Hunt and Uber Freight joined together in 2022 to establish the first set of appointment scheduling API standards for booking and managing shipments.  

"We have assembled a team of really world-class engineers from places like Amazon, Google, Facebook, Expedia, etcetera, which are working on solving freight customers hardest problems," Convoy president and COO Mark Okerstrom told CNBC's Frank Holland at the time of an April fundraising last year. "That is our primary investment area."

Previous to 2022, it created Convoy Go, which aims to reduce the time truckers spent waiting at docks to load and unload using machine learning to route and relocate drivers to hook up to a preloaded trailer. In 2021, Convoy also opened up its technology to others, launching Convoy for Brokers, which gives logistics companies and trucking brokers (previously viewed as rivals) the ability to post loads directly to its network and access its trucker capacity.

Since the peak of supply chain issues and demand spikes during the pandemic, which led to soaring prices in the logistics space, trucking rates have come back down, removing what had been a tailwind for Convoy's on-demand technology. The company, similar to other startups both inside and beyond the freight sector, has conducted multiple rounds of layoffs over the past year and cut an Atlanta office.

In a LinkedIn post about the restructuring, CEO Dan Lewis said the cuts were about "running a more efficient business overall and speeding our path to profitability." 

During what was a tough 2022 for the sector, the company secured a $260 million round of new capital from investors, led by U.K.-based Baillie Gifford and Hercules Capital, while JPMorgan extended a $150 million line of credit to Convoy.

Lewis remains convinced that tech is the way to lead trucking into the future.

"There will always be analog components because people need to pick up the phone and connect with each other," he told CNBC last April. "But I think that over the next decade, the industry is going to consolidate and it will consolidate around companies that are digitally led and data led, that are able to use data to make optimizations in the system to reduce waste."

—CNBC's Frank Holland contributed reporting.