Before Greg Price had a tenth anniversary to celebrate, he had a co-founder to replace. The company was called OtterLogic. An early partner’s circumstances changed, and the partner left. Price still had a team of engineers, an idea he believed in and a freight industry with plenty of problems. None of those things supplied a guarantee. He continued anyway. “I just didn’t quit,” he recalled.
Jason Traff would become his co-founder at Shipwell. The business would acquire a new name, move its first shipment and spend years trying to make transportation less dependent on people chasing information. But the interruption belongs near the beginning of Price’s story. It gives a little friction to the familiar account of an engineer who saw an opportunity and founded a company. Seeing the opportunity was the easy part. Keeping a company alive long enough to do something about it required other people.
That distinction runs through his career. Price works with systems, algorithms and machine learning. His explanations keep returning to the people expected to use them.
An engineer goes looking for the missing information
Price’s education began in electrical engineering at the University of Texas at Austin. He later earned engineering and business master’s degrees at MIT through the Leaders for Global Operations program. The combination put technical design beside the less tidy business of running an operation. A system could work beautifully in principle and still leave its users with an awkward Tuesday.
He spent seven years at MIT Lincoln Laboratory, developing hardware, software and algorithms for the US Department of Defense. That work preceded his career in freight, but supplied a relevant habit: looking at complicated arrangements as things that could be understood, modeled and improved. His résumé brought together physical equipment and the information needed to make it useful.
At McKinsey, where he joined after graduate study, he worked on operations and supply chain problems for large companies. Consumer goods, retail, manufacturing and oil and gas gave him different settings for a recurring puzzle. Businesses with substantial resources struggled to answer basic questions about spending, performance and the whereabouts of their goods. Plenty of purchasing power; surprisingly little clarity. There was a business opportunity in the gap, if he could make the answer usable.
- EngineeringTexas → MIT Lincoln Laboratory
- OperationsMIT graduate study → McKinsey
- FreightOtterLogic, 2016 → Shipwell
Freight had a coordination problem
Shipwell began in 2016. OtterLogic became Shipwell in 2017, the year the company dates its first shipment. The new name was helpfully literal. Freight is a field in which a little literalness can save everyone a meeting.
Traff brought operating experience from a global art shipping business. Price brought engineering and consulting experience. Their company developed transportation management software, usually shortened to TMS: tools for planning a movement, arranging transportation, watching its progress and handling the financial work afterward. The shipment is physical. Much of the difficulty surrounding it is informational.
A carrier, a warehouse and a customer may each know something the others need. Connecting them becomes a practical obligation, rather than an attractive diagram. The early product work included real-time driver tracking; Shipwell’s Automated Check Call feature won Best in Show at MarketWaves18. A $35 million Series B followed in 2019, alongside an expanding product that included a driver mobile app. Price’s project was gaining the means to address more of the journey. Every additional connection also widened the job of making the whole thing understandable.
A forecast has to earn its keep
By 2021, Price was talking about a more particular question: how should someone buying freight know whether a price makes sense? Shipwell introduced pricing intelligence tools with forecasts extending 14 days ahead, market comparisons and information delivered inside the work people were already doing.
The important detail was the ability to inspect the answer. Price described letting customers compare the forecasts with their own information and other data. The platform also included a confidence score. A forecast asks a customer to make a decision about money and service before events have settled the argument. Trust has to carry that interval.
“If you don’t have trust with your end customer, you really don’t have anything.”
Greg Price, on freight pricing
This is a modest-sounding constraint with considerable consequences for a product. Producing an answer and earning a place in someone’s working day are separate achievements. Price wanted the information available to frontline workers, where a decision could follow. The person arranging a shipment has to be able to use the forecast, question it and explain the resulting choice. An elegant prediction that nobody will act on has an expensive hobby’s relationship to the business.
The person between the alert and the answer
Price’s account of useful AI starts with the business outcome. In 2021, he argued for identifying the problem before assembling the data and for hiring people who could translate between operational needs and technical specifications. Those translators mattered because knowing how to build a model did not automatically explain which problem deserved one.
He also described a limitation of the dashboard: identifying an issue still leaves the issue waiting. People need a way to take action from the place where they discover it. Filters and clear priorities matter because an operation can produce more information than anyone can reasonably consider. A screen can become crowded while the work remains unchanged.
The stakes appear in a customer example Price discussed the following year. Shipwell reported that Marcus Technologies reduced shipping costs by 16.4% and claims by 50% over six months. These were results for that customer, rather than a promise for every shipper. Their significance is concrete: fewer costs and fewer claims. In 2022, Price received a Supply & Demand Chain Executive Pros to Know award. The more revealing measure of his work may be what a logistics team can stop spending its day doing.
Marcus Technologies results reported by Shipwell in March 2022. A customer example, not a platform-wide average.
The skateboard before the DeLorean
Price has acknowledged that a technology company can become too technical. Discussing Shipwell’s early electronic bill of lading, he described the temptation to assume customers should naturally abandon paper. The engineering argument was available. Adoption required understanding where the customer was starting.
His comparison was a DeLorean offered to someone still looking for a skateboard. It is an unusually cheerful image for enterprise software, and an admission with some weight behind it. A founder can be right about the eventual destination and wrong about the next purchase. The distance between those two things is where a customer has to live.
His writing about mobile technology extended the same concern to place. He envisaged warehouse staff, shipping managers and others responding to delays and changing shipments without returning to a desk. A phone’s camera and location capabilities could contribute information as well as display it. This was a practical definition of access: put the tools where the work happens. A desk is an inconvenient attachment to a loading dock.
There is a guitar after the calls
Price’s personal details offer a welcome change of scale. In his account of life in 2021, evenings included family dinner, guitar, games and training a new puppy. He also played online games with friends. His leadership biography identifies him as a Texas Longhorns fan. Even a career devoted to coordination leaves room for a football team over which one has no operational control.
These details suit someone whose work is so concerned with how people spend their attention. He has described relying on daily lists and careful calendar management. The company’s public portrait of him also emphasizes sustainability. In a field organized around moving physical goods, his interest in efficiency reaches beyond software design.
An interview bot walks into the conversation
At SXSW in 2026, Price offered a story with a different kind of visibility problem. During a hiring interview, he had spotted a candidate relying on an AI bot. The clue was the candidate’s eyes moving repeatedly across the answers. The anecdote drew a laugh. It also raised a question he now faces as an employer: what does someone’s use of AI reveal about their judgment?
Inside Shipwell, an assistant called Zeus brought that question into ordinary work. Running in Slack, it could draw on multiple information sources to answer product questions, investigate incidents, generate code and open pull requests. Price described a tool placed inside an existing communication channel, close to the people already asking for help.
The name suggests thunderbolts; the job includes support investigations. There is something pleasingly practical about that assignment. For Price, AI’s place in the company had reached both the product being sold and the work of building and supporting it.
Ten years, and the work between the screens
Shipwell marked its tenth anniversary in July 2026. By then, its product included an in-app AI assistant and a track-and-trace worker, alongside transportation management functions. The company reported 30% revenue growth for 2025 and a 55% increase in monthly shipment volume. Those figures describe the business Price leads; the continuing task is to make its growing capabilities useful to the people moving freight.
In September, Shipwell announced its inclusion in the 2027 FreightWaves FreightTech 100. The announcement offered an example from Airlite Plastics: the company said a team previously spending four to five hours daily chasing carrier updates was spending about one. It is a company-reported result, but the unit of measurement is telling. Hours recovered are easier to picture than a sweeping claim about the future.
Price began with companies that struggled to see what was happening. His attention has moved further into the question of who handles what happens next. The early founder departure, the emphasis on customer readiness and the insistence on trust all belong to that progression. Technical possibility needs people who can turn it into a working arrangement. Ten years after OtterLogic, that remains a substantial job.