The Yard, Then The Software
Drayage is the least-glamorous corner of freight. A ship arrives. Someone has to drive its containers somewhere. That someone is running a business on email chains, spreadsheets, and dispatch phones that ring for eleven hours a day. This has been true for approximately as long as containers have existed. Michael Mecca decided to change it, and the reason he could is that he grew up doing the dispatching himself.
Mecca is the founder and CEO of PortPro, a Kearny, New Jersey drayage TMS - transportation management system, in the industry's uncharitable acronym - that now sits at the center of more than 550 trucking companies' operations. The company was founded in 2019. It raised a $12 million Series A in January 2023. It employs roughly 140 people and generates something in the neighborhood of $16 million in annual revenue. It is headquartered a short drive from the Port of Newark, which is either poetic or practical depending on how you feel about origin stories.
Before PortPro, there was Mecca & Son Trucking Co., the family business, where Michael worked in operations from 2010 and then as VP of Logistics. Intermodal trucking, port drayage, warehousing. He also spent a stretch, from 2017 to 2019, as CEO and co-founder of Axle Technologies, a startup that took a run at the ELD - electronic logging device - compliance problem. Between those two data points sits the arc: he understood the workflow well enough to know what was broken, and he had already tried once to fix a smaller piece of it.
PortPro is the bigger swing. The product is a cloud platform for drayage carriers and, more recently, drayage brokers - dispatching, container tracking, invoicing, driver payments, customer portals, EDI integrations, all the connective tissue. In March 2024 the company shipped dedicated Carrier TMS and Brokerage TMS products, formalizing a split it had been running toward for a while. Somewhere between then and now, PortPro also became the first drayage TMS to embed an email inbox inside the software, which sounds like a small feature and is, in fact, the entire reason the company can now credibly talk about agentic AI.
Because if you embed the inbox, you also get the messages. And if you get the messages, you can tag them, summarize them, and draft replies to them. Which is what PortPro's newer AI agents - Jerry and Helen - do inside the TMS. They read customer email, they dispatch loads, they validate documents, they generate invoices, they quote freight. Mecca has been talking publicly about "agentic AI" since late 2023, which is early by drayage standards and roughly on-schedule by everyone-else standards.
The market Mecca is selling into is not a market that has historically bought a lot of software. Drayage operators tend to be family-run, cost-conscious, and skeptical of anything that requires them to change how they've done things for thirty years. The pitch that works, insofar as one does, is not about AI. It is about not having to type the same container number into six systems. PortPro's growth curve suggests the pitch is working.
At PortFest 2023, the company's user conference, Mecca listed the three obstacles to progress in drayage software: the complexity of drayage operations, the stagnation of the legacy software already in the market, and the industry's stubborn self-perception as a niche within the broader supply chain. Each of those three is a business problem. Each of them is also, if you squint, a competitive moat, which is presumably why Mecca is smiling in most of the photos.
He was named a 2025 Supply Chain Rock Star by Food Logistics Magazine, along with PortPro's Chief Customer Officer Toni Pisano. Rock star is not the word most drayage dispatchers would use to describe themselves. But then again, most drayage dispatchers have not raised $12 million to build software for other drayage dispatchers, which is what makes Mecca's version of the job description worth reading twice.
Mecca has been public about his view that logistics buyers systematically confuse rate with cost. "They didn't save money," he wrote in one post. "They just deferred the real cost. They chased price - not value or reliability." It is the kind of sentence that lands harder when the person writing it has spent a decade watching cheap freight cost his family's trucking company money.
PortPro's tech stack is broadly what you would expect from a Series A logistics SaaS company in the 2020s: React, Node.js, Next.js, MongoDB, PostgreSQL, Terraform, Kubernetes, Datadog, and enough AWS services to make an FinOps person nervous. There is also TensorFlow and OpenAI Whisper in the stack, which is where the AI agents live. The company sells directly and through partners. It is not, and does not appear to be trying to be, a horizontal supply chain platform. Drayage is the whole point.
Mecca attended Villanova University from 2012 to 2016 and studied business/managerial economics at LIU Post. His LinkedIn photo shows a man in a blazer with the expression of somebody who is thinking about a specific customer's dispatch board. He tweets, mostly through the company account. He shows up on stage at his own conferences. He posts thank-you notes when new employees join, which is a habit that says something about how the company is run.
The most interesting thing about Michael Mecca is not that he built a drayage TMS. Several companies have tried to build a drayage TMS. The interesting thing is that he built the drayage TMS his family's trucking company always wished it had - and then convinced 549 other drayage companies to buy it. That is not a Silicon Valley story. It is a Kearny story.