A customer wanted to know where a product was. Mathew Elenjickal was at the client’s site, helping implement a logistics system, when the call came in. For all the software involved, someone still had to find an answer. It was an awkward little interruption, the kind that disappears into a working day. Elenjickal kept returning to it.
He had seen large shippers send goods out of a plant or warehouse and then lose sight of what happened next. The information might arrive through a phone call, an email, a fax or an electronic update after the event. A company could plan an elaborate journey and still spend part of the afternoon asking somebody else whether the truck had turned up.
There is comedy in that mismatch, provided you are not the person waiting at the loading dock. Business software has a talent for making ordinary questions look sophisticated. Elenjickal’s opening was to keep the ordinary question intact. FourKites, which he founded in 2014, grew around giving shippers a clearer view of goods in motion. The question has since acquired more demanding follow-ups: when will they arrive, what happens if they are late, and who will do something about it?
The job that kept him in Chicago
Elenjickal was born in Kerala, in southern India, and went to Chennai for his undergraduate education. He studied mechanical engineering at the College of Engineering, Guindy, then moved to Chicago for a master’s in industrial engineering and management science at Northwestern. His education was already concerned with the practical business of making systems work.
Chicago nearly lost him. After graduate school, he was preparing to take an enterprise software job in Seattle. Instead, i2 Technologies persuaded him to stay. His first project involved optimizing delivery-truck routes for Anheuser-Busch. Beer had to move, vehicles had to be assigned, and software had to survive contact with a real operation.
He later worked at Oracle. Across those years, the distance between planning a shipment and knowing what was happening to it became hard to ignore. Consumer shopping provided an especially irritating comparison: an online purchase came with tracking information while a much more valuable business shipment could remain obscure. An inexpensive order had acquired a level of reassurance that industrial commerce was still chasing.
“I could order a pair of shoes on Amazon and know exactly where they are.”
Mathew Elenjickal, recalling the gap he saw in business logistics
First, a device. Then, a better question.
In 2012, he left his job and returned to Northwestern for an MBA at Kellogg. He arrived with a business problem and an intention to start a company. His first proposed solution was physical: work with a GPS manufacturer on a small tracking device, put it in trucks, and build software to monitor it.
The objections were practical and considerable. Why would a trucking company buy another device if it already had one? Would giving the hardware away guarantee that anyone used it? How would a young business pay to equip trucks across the country? Each question put another bill on the table.
He changed the design. FourKites would collect data from existing GPS providers and deliver it through a cloud platform. Conversations also changed his assumptions about customers. He initially regarded freight brokers as potential competitors. A meeting with Echo Global Logistics CEO Doug Waggoner showed him that brokers struggled with the same visibility problem as shippers. A suspected obstacle became a possible customer.
That sequence gives the founding story its character. Elenjickal did not simply become more persuasive about his original invention. He let the people around the problem alter the invention. The useful work was finding a way through the existing industry, with its devices, intermediaries and habits. Buying everyone a new gadget would have been a rather expensive way to avoid listening.
Early product design, before the commercial rollout.
A final exam, a term sheet, a food conference
Kellogg supplied more than a qualification. Elenjickal took part in its Zell Fellows program and used the school’s network to reach investors and prospective customers. By January 2017, FourKites had raised $16.5 million and appeared on Poets&Quants’ list of MBA startups. The classroom project had become an operating business.
He remembers receiving a term sheet from Hyde Park Venture Partners on the day he finished his last exam. During school, he had supported the prototype with his own money and proceeds from competitions. He also recruited an undergraduate friend to help build the product. Graduation was less a clean break than the moment several preparations began to come together.
The first commercial customer was Smithfield Foods. Elenjickal met the company at the Food Shippers of America conference in February 2015. In his account, Smithfield had 25 people making calls and filling spreadsheets to send shipment information to Walmart. The pilot worked, and Smithfield became a customer.
It is a wonderfully unglamorous starting point for a software company: people, phones and spreadsheets. The value had to show up in a routine that somebody already understood. If the new system could relieve that work, its usefulness would be visible without a lecture about the future. Enterprise buyers have actual afternoons to get through.
People making calls and filling spreadsheets at Smithfield before its FourKites pilot, according to Elenjickal’s account.
Learning where to get out of the way
Elenjickal’s account of running the company includes a candid assessment of his own limits. In 2017, he said he knew the industry but had never started a business. He hired people with startup experience and trusted them to fill the gaps. He also identified focused growth as a challenge: access to money makes it easier to chase too many things.
“I knew I had industry experience, but needed help building.”
Mathew Elenjickal, 2017
He credits his father, who ran a small business, with influencing his desire to start something. At Kellogg, Linda Darragh helped connect him to resources. Chicago operators Jai Shekhawat and Joe Beatty became people he could turn to for guidance. The founder’s independence came with a substantial address book.
One regret was waiting too long to move from selling the product himself to letting a professional team sell its business value. His later question to sales and marketing leaders was succinct: “How can I help?” It is a small adjustment with a large implication. The person who knows every feature must also learn when someone else should lead the conversation.
Yet he still favors close involvement. Looking back in 2025, he wrote that FourKites had lost momentum when it leaned too far toward a big-company management model. He also remembered advice from entrepreneur Tim Krauskopf: the pitch needed a clear, relatable story. Staying near the product and explaining its purpose were continuing responsibilities, even as the room became larger.
The map has local rules
Chicago gave Elenjickal access to logistics customers, experienced operators and talent. His work had also taken him elsewhere. Around 2008, he spent nearly a year in Brussels deploying a transportation management system, followed by time in Frankfurt. He saw how European logistics differed in subcontracting, privacy, communication and booking practices.
Those experiences shaped FourKites’ European expansion. He described adapting the product with existing customers before selling more widely. A truck crossing several countries encounters different restrictions; the arrival estimate has to account for them. A product that travels needs to understand the places it travels through.
The career lesson is unusually literal. Elenjickal’s early work required him to go where customers operated, and the company’s later expansion drew on what he learned there. International growth may look tidy on a map. In practice, a border introduces another set of questions, and an arrival time is only useful if the calculation respects the answers.
A late shipment needs more than a dot
By July 2024, FourKites was providing visibility for more than 3.2 million daily shipments. Elenjickal was still talking about unfinished basic work. He described a multinational business booking ocean freight manually through carrier websites and an analysis that found almost 20 steps involved in moving one piece of cargo. Knowing the location was one part of a much longer transaction.
In January 2025, FourKites launched its Intelligent Control Tower, combining real-time data, continuously updated digital twins of operations, and AI agents intended to perform routine tasks. The ambition moved further into execution: handle the work that follows an alert, including tracking inquiries, supplier management and appointment scheduling.
- LocateWhere is the shipment?
- PredictWhen will it arrive?
- ActWhat needs to happen next?
A conceptual progression, not a performance chart.
Loft followed in February 2026. FourKites introduced it as an orchestration platform working across enterprise systems and external network information. Its design includes keeping a record of decision context and approvals. The proposal addresses a familiar business difficulty: much of the explanation for a decision sits in messages and people’s memories, away from the transaction itself.
In September 2026, Elenjickal put the emphasis on measurable outcomes. Leaders, he argued, should begin with the result they are accountable for. He also raised the accounting difficulty of prevention: a disruption that never occurs can be hard to credit. Useful software can leave an oddly quiet trail.
That is where his original question has led him. A phone call about a missing shipment opened a business; fewer calls may be part of its next measure of success. Elenjickal has spent years following what people must do after goods leave the warehouse. The work keeps supplying him with another question, and he keeps asking who has to answer it.