Chris Cochran and the Business of Keeping the Lights On

For the first six months, FreightWise had a meeting place that required neither a lease nor a receptionist: a local bar. Chris Cochran, his fellow founders and a handful of developers worked remotely, coming together when a conversation needed a table. There are more ceremonial ways to begin a software company. There are also more expensive ones.

The arrangement suits a story about someone who pays attention to costs. Cochran had already built a parcel audit and analytics business, TracBack Solutions, and sold it to AFS in 2013. Some of the proceeds helped finance FreightWise. His second venture began with experience, his own capital at risk, and a problem that offered little glamour but plenty of work: helping companies understand what it costs to ship their goods.

A freight invoice is an unpromising object for a founder’s origin story. It arrives after the action, with numbers that need checking. Yet the distance between arranging a shipment and understanding its final cost became the working territory of Cochran’s career. He kept returning to the handoff between moving something and accounting for it.

A degree that belongs near the invoice

Cochran holds a bachelor’s degree in accounting from Tennessee Technological University and an MBA from Vanderbilt’s Owen Graduate School of Management. Accounting is an apt preparation for this particular business. A shipment has a physical journey and a financial one. The second journey needs someone to explain the charges, reconcile the records and make the result useful to the company paying.

His career also included five years at Oracle, with substantial involvement in Oracle Transportation Management. That put him close to enterprise software and the question that follows any new system into an established business: how will it connect to everything already here? A transportation product must live alongside accounting, order management and the routines of people who have work to finish.

At business school, he met Richard Hoehn. Hoehn would later recall that they had wanted to start a company together. Their eventual collaboration gave FreightWise a relationship that predated the product. That detail helps make sense of the early operation: people with different responsibilities working from a shared history, before the organization had much infrastructure of its own.

The arithmetic inside the company

By 2019, Cochran’s interest in visibility extended beyond customers’ bills. FreightWise discussed detailed departmental finances with employees in quarterly meetings. “We want to be very open,” he said. Auditors could earn extra pay for catching costly errors; salespeople could see the contribution behind their business.

The policy brought an accountant’s question into the office: what did the work contribute? Employees could see the score and had to be comfortable being measured. It was a demanding interpretation of transparency. A number deserved an explanation, whether it appeared on a carrier’s invoice or in an internal review.

“We’re a code-based shop.”

Chris Cochran, 2019

The small print behind No. 2

The public marker arrived in 2019, when FreightWise ranked No. 2 on the Inc. 5000. Its reported 2018 revenue was $33.6 million, with three-year growth of 30,548 percent. Those figures belong to that early period. Even with the dates attached, they help explain why a company concerned with shipping invoices suddenly attracted attention well beyond the shipping department.

Underneath the figures was a software-and-service operation. Cochran described a company that owned its intellectual property and combined technology with people who understood freight pricing. A system could organize information; specialists still had to interpret tariffs and help customers make decisions. For him, the work included both the platform and the expertise surrounding it.

Bootstrapping made that combination demanding. In a 2019 leadership conversation, Cochran recalled sharing hotel rooms and meals with Hoehn during customer trips. He also described hiring people into roles too late, leaving them overloaded almost as soon as they arrived. The admission gives the growth numbers a human scale: conserving money could leave a team short of help at exactly the wrong moment.

A growth ranking records acceleration. It leaves the staffing decisions to someone else. Cochran’s recollection is useful because it admits the gap between knowing a role is needed and having a trained person doing it. A company can sell faster than it can reorganize itself. The bill for that difference is often paid in an employee’s working day.

The financing story eventually changed, too. FreightWise received an investment from a group led by Unigestion, with Stillwater advising its shareholders. Early self-funding is one chapter of Cochran’s record. The later transaction matters because a founder’s choices can change as the organization does. A decision that helps launch a company need not govern every subsequent stage.

Another morning for Kuebix

In November 2023, FreightWise acquired Kuebix from Trimble. The transportation management platform already had users, employees and established ways of working. Cochran was taking on a different assignment from building an initial product. An acquisition brings a history with it, including customers who have already made decisions about where their daily work belongs.

FreightWise committed to continued investment in the Kuebix product suite and to continuity for existing users. It said the transfer would not disrupt daily operations. Those promises belong at the center of the deal’s meaning. For a shipper, a change of ownership is a practical matter if the software is part of tomorrow’s plan.

Cochran later recalled the first meeting with the Kuebix team in Boston as the “Sunrise Meeting.” He described a product that had faced a sunset and an opportunity to combine it with FreightWise’s services. The name has a touch of corporate theatre, but the underlying question was concrete: what could these teams build together for the people already using the platform?

A customer announcement soon supplied an example. In December 2023, Hunt Advantage Group became Kuebix’s first announced new customer after the acquisition. A master distributor for Hunt Brothers Pizza, it served thousands of customers across 21 states through its distributors. Its supply chain manager pointed to truckload capabilities, accounting tools, visibility and communication as reasons for choosing the system.

Pizza supplies make an agreeable change from an acquisition presentation. They also make the stakes easier to understand. There are deliveries to coordinate, customers waiting and financial records to keep straight. The usefulness of the combined business would have to show up in those tasks. A new owner’s enthusiasm could introduce the relationship; ordinary work would give it substance.

Make room for the smaller shipper

The January 2025 introduction of OnKue by Kuebix put a smaller-scale offering into that picture. FreightWise presented a cloud-based tool with options to move into more extensive services as requirements grew. An announced Estes Express Lines partnership brought negotiated carrier rates into the offering. The direction was consistent with Cochran’s interest in giving smaller shippers access to tools and relationships they might struggle to assemble alone.

That is a more specific ambition than simply selling software to everyone. A smaller company may need transportation tools without wanting to build a large transportation department around them. The product has to fit the size of the task and the people available to do it. Adding sophistication is useful only if someone can put it to work.

Cochran’s public conversations have continued along that line. In August 2025, a Real Leadership podcast appearance covered transportation management, AI adoption and lessons from the business. The subjects were newer in places, familiar in others. The question beneath them remained recognizable: how can technology and outside expertise make a shipper’s working day more manageable?

People he has worked with before

In March 2026, FreightWise appointed Chris Haarmeyer as chief technology officer, with an agenda that included platform functionality and artificial intelligence. Cochran had worked with him at Oracle in 2008. Welcoming him publicly, he recalled their work bringing Oracle Transportation Management to Averitt Express and described it as his first real exposure to the less-than-truckload ecosystem.

That is a career connection with some mileage on it. The colleague from an earlier chapter arrived with new responsibilities in a company Cochran had since helped create. His broader commitments also include board service at S3 Recycling Solutions and the Greater Nashville Technology Council. The network around the founder extends into the region’s technology and operating businesses.

When Cochran was named a 2023 EY Entrepreneur Of The Year Southeast finalist, he credited FreightWise employees. He made the connection to customers explicit: “At FreightWise, we are only successful if our clients are successful.” It is a statement with an operational test. The client has to be able to see the benefit in the work.

The early meetings required a table. The later business required developers, freight specialists, carrier relationships and teams willing to keep improving an existing product. Across those changes, Cochran’s working territory has stayed remarkably concrete: the shipment, the invoice and the person trying to make sense of both. Tomorrow, someone will need to book another load.