The Dispatch
A software company for the freight nobody thinks about
Every ocean container that lands at a North American port has to get somewhere - a warehouse, a rail yard, a distribution center a few miles inland. That short, unglamorous move is called drayage, and it is where a surprising amount of money is quietly won or lost. Containers that sit too long rack up demurrage fees. Empty returns burn miles. Appointments get missed. For decades, the trucking companies and brokers who do this work ran it on legacy software and, just as often, on spreadsheets and email.
PortPro is the company betting that drayage deserves better. Founded in 2019 by Michael Mecca - who grew up in the drayage business before building software for it - the New Jersey firm makes what it calls a drayage operating platform: a transportation management system, or TMS, designed exclusively for the carriers and brokers that move containers. The pitch is not that PortPro does everything in freight. It is that PortPro does one thing, drayage, and does it completely.
“PortPro is an operating platform built for drayage trucking companies, brokerages, and those that do both.”
- PortPro
The distinction matters. A general-purpose TMS treats a container haul like any other load. Drayage has its own vocabulary and its own failure modes: terminal appointment windows, chassis availability, per-diem clocks, port congestion, accessorial charges that are easy to forget and expensive to miss. PortPro's software is shaped around those specifics rather than bolted on afterward.
That focus shows up in the product. The platform, known as drayOS, handles order entry, dispatch, container tracking, appointment setting, accounts receivable and payable, driver settlements and reporting in one system. It works for asset-based carriers that own trucks, for non-asset brokers that don't, and for the many companies that are somehow both at once.
It also shows up in smaller, telling choices. When PortPro shipped what it described as the first drayage TMS with an embedded email inbox, the message was clear: drayage still runs on email, so rather than force operators to abandon that habit, PortPro brought the inbox inside the software where it could sit next to the loads it referred to.
The company reports hundreds of drayage carriers and brokers on the platform - it cites more than 550 - and ratings hovering around 4.7 to 4.8 out of five on review sites like G2 and Capterra, where it has been recognized as a top performer in the TMS category.
