Jordan Graft

Jordan Graft spends his days on a problem most people outside of trucking never think about: whether the truck showing up to haul a load belongs to the company that booked it.

That question sits at the center of Highway, the Dallas company Graft founded in 2022 and still runs as CEO. Highway calls its work Carrier Identity - a phrase that did not exist as a product category until Graft put a company behind it. The pitch is straightforward. Freight brokers move billions of dollars of goods by handing loads to carriers they often have never met. Highway's job is to verify that those carriers are real, connected to a legitimate operation, and matched to freight they can actually handle.

The urgency comes from how fraud has changed. For years, a broker could vet a carrier with a few emails, an insurance certificate, and a basic rules check. Graft argues that world is gone. "People used to be able to hire a carrier based on three emails, passing a rules assessment and an insurance certification and that's just not possible anymore," he has said. Cargo theft and identity fraud have grown more organized, and the old trust model no longer holds.

Graft describes fraud almost like a formula. He says it needs three things to survive: anonymity, urgency, and the prospect of gain. Highway's design attacks the first of those. Strip away a fraudster's ability to hide behind a stolen or borrowed identity, he reasons, and the rest of the scheme gets much harder to pull off. The graphic below breaks down that framework.

Not just a gate - a dial

What separates Highway's approach, in Graft's telling, is that it treats compliance as adjustable rather than binary. A broker should not vet every carrier the same way. High-value electronics deserve more scrutiny than a routine regional haul. "You have to have a multilayered solution that's looking at not just does this carrier pass my overall company's rules assessment, but what type of freight am I willing to give that carrier?" he says.

That is why Highway lets brokers set requirements at the load level instead of applying one blanket policy. "We allow brokers to do load level compliance and change the requirements, and that's so important in this industry right now, because you have to reduce friction," Graft says. The goal is security that does not grind the business to a halt - tight where the risk is high, lighter where it is low.

The "make the broker the hero" line is more than a slogan. It reflects how Graft positions the whole company. Highway does not move freight or replace the broker. It sits underneath the broker, doing the verification work so the person booking the load looks sharper and safer to their own customers. It is a supplier-of-trust posture, and it shapes which features get built.

Four careers, one thread

Graft did not arrive in freight from the loading dock. He earned a finance and economics degree from Baylor University and started on Wall Street, working as an investment analyst at J.P. Morgan in New York. From there he moved into private equity at TA Associates in Boston, learning how businesses are valued, financed, and scaled.

Then he did something unusual for a finance professional: he taught himself to code. By his own account, Graft became self-taught in six programming languages and co-founded CrateBind, a Dallas software and consulting shop that built more than fifty custom applications across a range of industries. That combination - an investor's read on business and a builder's willingness to ship software - would define everything that came next.

The pivotal chapter was TriumphPay. Graft became its CEO in 2018 and, over three years, reshaped it from a reverse-factoring business into a payments network for freight. Under him, it grew into the largest payer of freight invoices in the United States. That role put him deep inside the plumbing of how money and trust move through trucking - and exposed the identity gap that would become Highway.

Why the market noticed

A company founded in 2022 does not usually land the largest freight brokerage in the country as a partner. Highway did, teaming with C.H. Robinson on carrier identity protection and fraud prevention - a signal that the category Graft named is being taken seriously at the top of the industry. In 2025 the company also announced a strategic growth-equity investment led by FTV Capital, with participation from Lead Edge Capital, capital aimed at extending its position as the industry standard for broker fraud protection.

For Graft, the thread connecting J.P. Morgan, CrateBind, TriumphPay, and Highway is trust you can verify. Money and freight both run on it, and both fall apart when identity can be faked. His aspiration is to make verified carrier identity the default across freight, so brokers can prevent fraud, cut friction, and build networks they can actually rely on. Three CEO chairs before 40 gave him the operating scars. Highway is where he is applying them.

• He taught himself six programming languages despite a finance and economics background.
• He was a three-time CEO before turning 40.
• He coined "Carrier Identity" as a distinct product category in freight.
• He started his career in investment banking at J.P. Morgan in New York.
• He has built two companies in Dallas, including the software shop CrateBind.