Cargomatic

A truck idles at the gate. Cargomatic already knows where it's going.

Who they are now

At the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, a container comes off a ship and waits. It has waited like this for a hundred years - for a driver, a chassis, a phone call, a fax. Somewhere a dispatcher is dialing a number that may not pick up. Multiply that small friction by every box on every dock and you have the quiet, expensive chaos that defines the first mile of American freight.

Cargomatic is the company that decided the waiting was optional. Today it runs a digital marketplace that connects shippers with local and regional trucking capacity in real time - drayage off the ports, intermodal across the rails, less-than-truckload, full-truckload, and the occasional white-glove delivery for cargo that prefers to be handled gently. A carrier with an empty afternoon opens an app, sees a nearby load on their route, and accepts it. The dock clears. The dispatcher exhales.

It is not glamorous work. Cargomatic has never pretended otherwise. The company's coverage now reaches all of the top 20 US ports, it employs roughly 170 people, and in March 2025 it was named Local Freight Carrier of the Year. The ambition is unfashionable and enormous: make the most overlooked part of logistics so smooth that nobody notices it at all.

Half the truck is empty. The other half is on hold.

The problem they saw

Here is a fact the trucking industry would rather you not dwell on: an enormous share of truck miles are run empty. A driver delivers a load, then deadheads back to the yard with nothing but air in the trailer. The capacity exists. It is simply invisible to the shipper three miles away who would gladly pay to fill it.

Short-haul and drayage freight made the problem worse. These are small, local, fragmented moves - thousands of independent owner-operators, no central directory, no standard way to find a load or a truck. The long-haul market had brokers and load boards. The local market had a phone, a Rolodex, and a lot of hope. The result was congestion at the ports, demurrage fees for shippers whose boxes sat too long, and drivers leaving money on the table every single trip.

The irony was almost too neat. The most local, most physical, most human corner of logistics - the one happening in plain sight at every port in the country - was also the least connected. Everybody could see the trucks. Nobody could see the capacity.

Two founders bet that a truck could be hailed like a cab.

The founders' bet

In 2013, Brett Parker and Jonathan Kessler started Cargomatic on a premise that sounds obvious now and sounded slightly mad then: if a smartphone could match a passenger to the nearest driver, it could match a pallet to the nearest truck. Same physics, larger cargo, far worse paperwork.

They built it where the freight was thickest - the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach - and in 2015 the Port of Los Angeles itself was publicly experimenting with the technology to ease congestion. The early product was a two-sided marketplace: shippers posted loads, carriers with unused space claimed them, and Cargomatic handled the billing and the bills of lading that drivers had always dreaded.

The leadership matured around the bet. Richard Gerstein, who had earlier founded the multimodal logistics firm IntelliTrans and holds a Master's in Transportation Engineering from UC Berkeley, joined in 2017 and became CEO - a man who was optimizing supply chains before there was an app store to put one in. Around him sits a full operating bench: a chief revenue officer, a chief product and technology officer, a COO, a CFO, and a chief people officer. The startup grew up into an operator.

One platform for every kind of local freight.

What you can actually do with it

For a shipper, Cargomatic is a place to enter an origin, a destination, a weight, and a deadline - and then watch the system handle billing, paperwork, and real-time tracking instead of a clipboard. For a carrier, the Driver app is the whole job in a pocket: see nearby available shipments, accept one that's already on your route, get directions, photograph the bill of lading, and email proof of delivery without ever touching a fax machine.

Underneath sits smart routing and load bundling - the software that decides which trucks should carry which boxes, so fewer of them run empty. The service menu reads like the unglamorous backbone of commerce: drayage from the ports, intermodal across rail, full-truckload, less-than-truckload for shippers without their own fleets, and white-glove handling for freight that needs care. Cargomatic leans on its port and terminal relationships to pull cargo off congested docks days faster, which for a shipper translates directly into thousands of dollars saved in storage and demurrage.

The pitch to both sides is the same and refreshingly blunt: stop wasting the truck. The carrier earns on a trip that used to run empty. The shipper moves goods faster and cheaper. Cargomatic keeps the margin in the middle for making the match. Marketplace economics, applied to asphalt.

The receipts: ports, partners, and a purchase.

Customers, data, partnerships

Marketplaces live or die on density, and Cargomatic spent a decade building it where it mattered most. Its customer base runs from small and mid-sized shippers without dedicated fleets to large enterprises moving freight off the busiest docks in the hemisphere, matched against a network of independent and small-fleet carriers looking to fill the trip home.

The proof shows up in the relationships. The Port of Los Angeles put Cargomatic forward as a congestion-fighting technology back in 2015. Rail operator Genesee & Wyoming joined as a strategic investor in the Series B. And in June 2024, Cargomatic stopped only matching trucks and bought some: its acquisition of ITG Transportation Services folded real trucking capacity into the platform - a marketplace deciding it wanted a stake in the asphalt itself.

Then came the recognition the industry hands out sparingly. In March 2025, Logistics Tech Outlook named Cargomatic Local Freight Carrier of the Year, and the company signed on as a sponsor of Manifest 2026, the supply chain world's annual gathering. None of it is loud. All of it suggests the boring bet is working.

Make the first mile so smooth nobody notices it.

The mission & why it matters tomorrow

Cargomatic's mission has stayed stubbornly consistent: build the first and largest marketplace for local freight, eliminate empty miles, and bring transparency to a corner of logistics that ran on phone calls and guesswork. It is the kind of goal that wins no design awards and quietly reshapes an economy.

The reason it matters tomorrow is the reason it mattered the day it started, only more so. Ports are more congested. E-commerce expects same-day everything. Carbon counts now, and an empty truck is both wasted money and wasted emissions. Every load Cargomatic bundles onto a route that was running anyway is a small win on cost, speed, and sustainability at once - the rare three-for-one in a famously thin-margin business.

So return to the yard. The truck still idles at the gate at six in the morning. But now the load is already assigned, the paperwork is already moving, and the driver is already heading somewhere useful instead of waiting on a phone that might not ring. The container does not sit for a hundred years. It moves. That is the entire point, and Cargomatic has spent a decade making it look ordinary.

See the Driver app in motion

Product walkthrough

▶ Cargomatic Mobile App - New Drayage Walkthrough