Highway
It All Starts With
Carrier Identity

In freight, a broker can do everything right - negotiate the rate, book the load, tender the paperwork - and still hand a shipment to a stranger. For years the industry ran on a handshake and a PDF. Highway was built on the premise that the handshake was the problem.

Founded in 2022 and based in Dallas, Highway makes software that answers one deceptively hard question before a load ever moves: is this carrier who they claim to be? The company calls its category "Carrier Identity," and it has convinced a large share of the freight-brokerage market to treat identity as the first step in every booking rather than an afterthought.

The identity check freight forgot to build

Highway connects a carrier's digital identity - the email addresses, phone numbers and documents a broker sees on a screen - to its physical identity: the actual authority, equipment and telematics of a real trucking company. When those two things don't line up, someone is usually trying to impersonate a legitimate carrier or re-broker a load they were never entitled to haul. That mismatch is the mechanical heart of double brokering and freight fraud, and Highway's patent-pending identity engine is designed to surface it in real time.

The engine watches more than 225,000 carriers, so verification isn't a one-time gate at onboarding but an ongoing signal. If a carrier's profile suddenly changes hands or its details drift, Highway can flag it before the next load is tendered.

Three products, one exchange

Highway's suite maps neatly onto the broker's workflow - sourcing, onboarding, and ongoing compliance - and in 2025 it added a marketplace that puts identity at the center of the transaction itself.

The customers: brokers first, carriers next

Highway's core customers are freight brokers and third-party logistics firms - the middlemen who match shippers' loads with trucking capacity and who bear the financial risk when a load is stolen or misdirected. More than 1,050 brokers use the platform, including 70 of the 100 largest freight brokers in the United States. That concentration among the biggest players is telling: the brokers with the most loads, and the most to lose, adopted it first.

Increasingly, carriers are customers too. The Highway for Carriers app extends the same verification to drivers and fleets, giving each a single verified identity - what the company describes as a "Single Sign-On for trucking" - to onboard faster and reach legitimate freight from trusted brokers.

Why double brokering is so costly

Freight fraud thrives on anonymity. A bad actor can spin up a convincing-looking carrier, accept a load, and disappear - or quietly re-broker it to an unwitting third party, pocketing the difference and leaving the shipper, broker and honest trucker to sort out the wreckage. The losses are large enough that the problem has drawn attention at the federal level, and Highway's CEO has become a frequently cited voice on how the schemes work and evolve. Highway's answer is not to chase fraud after the fact but to remove the anonymity that makes it possible.

Identity as the foundation, not a feature

Plenty of vendors sell carrier monitoring - checking authority status, insurance and safety scores. Incumbents like RMIS, Descartes' MyCarrierPortal and Carrier411 have long offered pieces of this. Highway's distinction is framing: it treats identity verification as the foundation the rest of the workflow sits on, links digital and physical signals rather than reading static documents, and keeps monitoring continuously instead of stamping a carrier "approved" once. That reframing - identity first - is what let a company only a few years old become a default step for the industry's largest brokers.

Subscriptions today, transactions tomorrow

Highway sells B2B software subscriptions to brokers and 3PLs, embedding its vetting, onboarding and monitoring directly into the transportation management systems they already run - integrations with platforms such as McLeod Software, Turvo, AscendTMS and telematics provider Samsara make it part of the daily workflow rather than a separate portal. The Trusted Freight Exchange points to a second engine: with pricing intelligence and payments supplied through Triumph, Highway can build value - and potentially revenue - around each booked load, not just each seat.

A three-time CEO who left payments for identity

Highway was founded by Jordan Graft, who was a three-time chief executive before turning 40 - including a stint running a grocery-delivery startup and, most relevantly, leading the freight-payments network TriumphPay. That payments background matters: he had already spent years inside the money movement between brokers and carriers, which is exactly where fraud does its damage. Graft studied finance and economics at Baylor University. Highway's continued ties to Triumph - first a 2023 partnership to fight double brokering, then Triumph powering the Trusted Freight Exchange - trace directly back to that history.

The trust layer of digital freight

Freight is digitizing - load boards, automated tendering, instant booking - but automation without identity just moves fraud faster. Highway positions itself as the verification layer beneath that digital shift: the thing that has to be true before automated freight is safe. In August 2025, growth investors FTV Capital and Lead Edge Capital backed that thesis with a strategic minority investment, adding two directors to Highway's board. For a category the company effectively named, becoming the industry standard for carrier identity is the whole ambition - and, so far, the trajectory.

Figures reflect publicly reported company and press-release data as of mid-2025; the size of the 2025 growth investment was not disclosed. Some third-party data aggregators list differing early-stage funding figures.