Chazz Sims

The man rerouting the last mile, one machine-learned turn at a time

Picture the beer truck. Seven hundred and fifty of them, actually, rolling out of Anheuser-Busch depots before dawn. Every one carries a plan for the day - which bars, which corner stores, which order, which minutes. By nine in the morning the plan is already wrong. A road closes. A bar manager calls in an extra pallet. A driver hits a wall of traffic that no printout could have predicted. Somewhere in that gap between the plan and the pavement is the company Chazz Sims built.

Sims is CEO and co-founder of Wise Systems, a Boston-area software company that does one deceptively narrow thing: it plans delivery routes, and then it keeps re-planning them while the trucks are still moving. Traffic, new orders, where each driver actually is right now - the software swallows all of it and hands back a better route before the driver has finished the last stop. Fleets that run it report shaving 10 to 15 percent off their mileage and cutting late deliveries by as much as 80 percent.

He has a tidy way of describing the enemy. "We're solving the old 'cable guy scenario,'" he told Forbes, "where you know you're going to get a package at some point, but you could wait all day." Everyone has lived inside that sentence. Sims decided it was not a customer-service failing but an optimization problem, and optimization problems have answers.

That line is the tell. Most logistics founders talk about packages. Sims talks about cities. To him a fleet of delivery vehicles is a moving sensor network, tracing the arteries of a place with every stop it makes. "We're privileged to optimize every city that Wise Systems navigates," he has said, "with every new driver, delivery, and route." It is a strangely tender way to describe dispatch software, and it is the reason the company reads less like a routing tool and more like a point of view.

The category has a name inside the company: autonomous dispatch. The idea is to fully automate the coordination of goods, people, and services - from the moment an order is created, through the driver or vehicle that fulfills it, all the way to the door. Not a smarter map. A system that decides. The routing engine leans on machine learning for the unglamorous variables that actually break schedules, like how long a given stop really takes. A loading dock is not a curbside handoff. A hospital is not a house. Wise Systems learns those service times instead of guessing them, and that quiet detail is where a lot of the magic hides.

It started as homework

Wise Systems did not begin in a garage. It began in a classroom. In 2014, Sims walked into the Development Ventures class at the MIT Media Lab and met the people who would become his co-founders - Ali Kamil, Layla Shaikley, and Jemel Derbali, a crew drawn from MIT and Harvard. The class was designed to turn ideas into ventures. Theirs kept going after the semester ended.

Sims had arrived at MIT by way of Irmo, South Carolina, a town outside Columbia. He graduated from the Ben Lippen School in 2009, earned a bachelor's in computer science from MIT in 2013, and stayed on for a master's in engineering. Along the way he collected the sort of resume that does not fit on a single line: research at the Media Lab's Human Dynamics Lab, plus stints across finance, healthcare, mobile technology, and - genuinely - restaurant work in Argentina. He once won a sponsor award from Electronic Arts in an iOS game-building competition at MIT. The through-line is not a single industry. It is a habit of showing up in unfamiliar rooms and building something that works.

A pandemic that ran on delivery

Every logistics company claims to matter. Then came a year that actually checked the claim. When 2020 rerouted the entire economy through the last mile, the fleets Sims serves were suddenly load-bearing. Wise Systems helped companies like Anheuser-Busch and Lyft keep moving through the disruption - repair scheduling here, hundreds of trucks there - when the old fixed routes could not bend fast enough. Forbes noticed. In its 2021 list, it named Sims to the 30 Under 30 in Enterprise Technology, crediting the company's role in keeping supply chains alive under pressure. A year earlier, an MIT AI conference had tagged him a rising star among founders under 35.

The recognition is real, but it is not the interesting part. The interesting part is that the software had to prove itself in exactly the conditions it was designed for: a world where the plan is always wrong by nine in the morning, and the only thing that helps is a system that can change its mind faster than the road does.

Sims still frames the work in that wider register. Not packages. Cities. Not a routing tool. A live read on how a place actually moves. He grew up on a motto he has kept close - never give up - and there is a version of that stubbornness baked into the product itself. A route that will not settle for the plan it started with. Software that keeps solving, stop after stop, because the city keeps changing and so, insists Chazz Sims, should the route.