Inside Pallet: Culture, Ownership, and the Race to Automate the Physical Economy
A behind-the-scenes look at the culture of Pallet, an AI logistics-tech company building the intelligence infrastructure for the global movement of goods. Founder and CEO Sushanth and members of the team describe a fast-moving, ownership-driven workplace where decisions are made in meetings and acted on within the hour, where everyone pitches in across engineering, sales, and post-sales, and where the company aims to become a generational logistics AI company. The piece captures Pallet's values, its people-first ethos, and what it feels like to build software that recreates decades-old logistics workflows.
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The $2.5 Trillion Question: Why 95% of Enterprise AI Pilots Fail (and How Supply Chains Beat the Odds)
Sushanth Raman, founder and CEO of San Francisco-based supply chain AI company Pallet, delivers a conference keynote tackling the central paradox of the enterprise AI boom: despite a projected $2.5 trillion in AI spending in 2026, an MIT study finds 95% of enterprise AI pilots fail. Raman argues the failures stem not from weak frontier models but from messy real-world deployments, uncaptured tribal knowledge, legacy integrations, and poor change management. He offers a three-part framework for evaluating AI vendors, explains why building in-house is harder than it looks, and presents three case studies (Lineage, Prism Logistics, and Mallory Alexander) where Pallet drove millions in savings and 99%+ accuracy on tasks like customs filing.
Launch of Pallet Forge
On May 14, 2026, logistics AI company Pallet launched Pallet Forge, an 'agent factory' that compresses the build-and-deploy cycle for production-grade logistics AI agents from roughly six months to six weeks. Authored by co-founder and CEO Sushanth Raman, the announcement frames Forge as Pallet's answer to the industry's pilot-to-production gap — citing the MIT finding that only 5% of enterprise GenAI pilots generate measurable P&L impact. Forge works by connecting to a customer's systems (TMS, WMS, ERP, EDI, email, and legacy AS400), encoding operational rules and carrier preferences inferred from historical data instead of hand-written SOPs, and running thousands of simulations to tune agent accuracy automatically. Early proof points include Everest Transportation running on 20,000+ customer-specific encoded memories and Eassons Transport Group hitting 98% touchless processing after going live in 40 days — with subsequent customers onboarded in as little as 48 hours.
What Is an AI Workforce for Logistics?
An AI workforce for logistics is a system of AI agents that autonomously execute the repetitive administrative work that runs freight and supply chain operations — order entry, quoting, tracking, billing, customs filings and customer service. Pallet's platform deploys these agents across email, voice, documents, APIs and remote desktops, encoding a company's operating procedures so agents can run workflows from quote to cash. The goal is to automate the roughly $1 trillion in annual coordination work that keeps the physical economy moving, freeing human teams to focus on judgment, relationships and growth.
Pallet vs Parade: AI Agents for Brokers and 3PLs Compared
A head-to-head look at two AI companies serving freight brokers and 3PLs: Parade, whose CoDriver agent answers inbound carrier calls and whose platform has helped move $40B in transacted freight, and Pallet, which automates the back office end-to-end from quote to cash across email, voice, API and remote desktop. The comparison finds the two overlap less than the marketing suggests: Parade owns the front-of-house carrier relationship and capacity discovery, while Pallet owns the document-heavy operational workflows that turn a booked load into collected cash.
AI Agents vs RPA in Logistics: What's the Difference?
A plain-English breakdown of the difference between AI agents and traditional robotic process automation (RPA) in logistics. RPA runs rigid, rules-based scripts that break the moment a portal button moves or a document arrives in the wrong format; AI agents reason toward a goal, read unstructured email and PDFs, and handle the exceptions that make up the bulk of real freight work. The piece uses Pallet (pallet.com) and its CoPallet AI workforce as a lead example, and surveys other players in the space including HappyRobot, Vooma, and FleetWorks.
Pallet vs Greenscreens.ai: Workflow Automation vs Rate Intelligence
A plain-spoken comparison that clears up a common category confusion in freight tech: Greenscreens.ai is rate intelligence and dynamic pricing infrastructure, while Pallet is end-to-end workflow automation. The two solve different problems — one tells you what to charge, the other actually does the work — and for many brokerages, Pallet integrates with Greenscreens rather than replacing it. The piece also notes Triumph Financial's 2025 acquisition of Greenscreens as a sign the pricing-data layer of freight tech is maturing and consolidating.
Pallet Agent Platform
The Pallet Agent Platform is an AI system that runs supply chain operations end-to-end, from quote to cash. It lets logistics companies encode their operating knowledge, deploy autonomous agents, and automate workflows like order capture, shipment execution, customer service, billing, and customs filings. Agents work across email, voice, documents, APIs, EDI, browsers, and remote desktop, and plug into major logistics platforms such as CargoWise, Descartes, Blue Yonder, Manhattan Associates, and e2open. Pallet builds custom models from client data that stay client-owned, validates them through thousands of simulations before production, and typically goes live in six weeks.
Who Competes With Pallet? Mapping the Freight-AI Automation Field
A competitive map of the freight-AI automation field, positioning Pallet against the venture-backed newcomers HappyRobot and Vooma, the entrenched TMS software vendors, and the offshore BPO shops that have long run the logistics back office. Pallet, a San Francisco startup that raised $27M Series B (bringing total funding to $50M), sells CoPallet, an 'AI workforce' that completes end-to-end logistics workflows inside TMS, WMS and ERP systems 10x faster and at roughly half the cost of human staffing. The story surveys how each rival attacks the same back-office spend and where Pallet's end-to-end, system-of-record approach differs.
Pallet: AI Logistics Workforce for Freight Brokerages
Pallet builds an AI logistics workforce that automates the manual back-office work at the heart of freight brokerages. Its AI agents handle load entry, appointment scheduling, driver document processing, proof-of-delivery, and invoice auditing directly inside existing systems like McLeod and DAT, keeping humans in the loop for oversight and edge cases. The company says brokerages process loads up to 10x faster, cut processing errors by 30%, and save 50% on back-office labor. Founded in 2022 by former Retool engineers Sushanth Raman and Andrew Spencer, Pallet has raised $50 million to date, including a $27M Series B led by General Catalyst.
Pallet Atlas
Pallet Atlas is a data intelligence platform for logistics that ingests operational data from TMS, WMS, ERP systems, email, and documents, then normalizes and connects customers, subsidiaries, facilities, lanes, and contracts into a single network model. It enriches that model with outside signals like spot rates, lane density, distribution center locations, and weather, and lets operators ask plain-English questions to surface hidden revenue opportunities in seconds instead of days.
Pancakes & Pajamas at Pallet
Pallet, a fast-growing startup, hosted a 'Pancakes & Pajamas' morning event that turned into a perfect window into the company's culture. Head of Talent Grace Turner used the LinkedIn post to celebrate the team's light-hearted spirit and to announce an ambitious hiring sprint: 30 new hires in 6 weeks. The post and its comment thread feature playful banter from team members Ankur Gupta (who invented a 'fake statistic' that good breakfast boosts output) and Bradley Callahan (whose blueberry pancakes achieved 'culinary innovation'), painting a portrait of a team that works hard and doesn't take itself too seriously.
Why 95% of AI Agents Fail in Logistics — Pallet CEO Sushanth Raman on TPM Today
On this episode of TPM Today, JOC senior technology editor Eric Johnson interviews Sushanth Raman, founder and CEO of Pallet, an AI-agent company built for the logistics industry. Raman explains why an oft-cited MIT study found that 95% of enterprise AI projects fail — arguing the root cause is missing 'tribal knowledge' and organizational context rather than flashy technology. He details how Pallet captures the undocumented business rules inside freight forwarders, 3PLs and shippers to automate document processing, container tracking, ISFs, billing and air-freight procurement, and lays out how operators should vet AI vendors. The pair also discuss the 'AWSification' of logistics labor, real EBITDA impact, and why, despite the hype, the industry is still very early in AI adoption.
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On the Pallet team
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LiveCompany Facts
At a glanceUpdates
Recent updatesTimeline
Company historyEx-Retool engineers Sushanth Raman and Andrew Spencer start Pallet (legal name Cashew Systems Inc.) to automate freight's back office.
Pallet raises roughly $3M in seed funding led by Bain Capital Ventures.
Pallet raises an $18M Series A to expand CoPallet across warehouse and transportation workflows.
General Catalyst leads a $27M Series B (bringing total funding to ~$50M); Pallet ships AS400 support, Forge and Parallel Agents and wins FreightWaves' inaugural AI Excellence award.
Pallet launches Atlas, its revenue-intelligence platform, in March and announces expansion into Europe at DELIVER Europe.
Product History
What shipped, and whenCoPallet
AI workforce that automates back-office logistics workflows - order entry, quoting, load building, rate negotiation, portal updates, document parsing - inside TMS/WMS/ERP systems, with claimed 97%+ accuracy at 10x speed and roughly half the cost of traditional staffing.
Atlas
Data-intelligence platform that ingests operational data from TMS, WMS, ERP, email and documents, normalizes it into a unified model, and surfaces hidden revenue - multi-leg and backhaul opportunities, account prioritization, churn risk and seasonal capacity planning.
Forge
Configuration layer that lets logistics teams build and tune their own AI agents on top of the Pallet platform.
Parallel Agents
Capability for running multiple concurrent AI agents per shipment or workflow.
FAQs
Frequently askedWhat does Pallet do?
Pallet builds an AI workforce for logistics. Its main product, CoPallet, automates repetitive back-office freight tasks - order entry, quoting, document parsing, rate negotiation and portal updates - inside existing TMS, WMS and ERP systems, claiming 10x speed at roughly half the cost of traditional staffing.
Who founded Pallet and when?
Pallet was founded in 2020 by Sushanth Raman (co-founder and CEO) and Andrew Spencer, both former early engineers at Retool. It is legally incorporated as Cashew Systems Inc. and headquartered in San Francisco.
How much funding has Pallet raised?
Pallet has raised roughly $50M total: a ~$3M seed (2021, Bain Capital Ventures), an $18M Series A (October 2024) and a $27M Series B led by General Catalyst (May 2025), with Bain Capital Ventures, Activant Capital and Bessemer Venture Partners also participating.
What is Atlas?
Atlas is Pallet's data-intelligence platform, launched in March 2026. It ingests operational data from TMS, WMS, ERP, email and documents, normalizes it, and surfaces hidden revenue opportunities such as backhaul and multi-leg lanes, account prioritization, churn risk and seasonal capacity planning.
Who are Pallet's customers?
Pallet serves freight brokers, 3PLs, freight forwarders, carriers, warehouses and shippers. Named customers include STG Logistics, Mallory Alexander, Prism Logistix, Eassons Transport Group, Knight, Swift, Lineage, Rinchem, USPack and Estee Lauder.