A shipment rarely becomes interesting while it is moving according to plan. It becomes interesting when a truck misses its pickup, a container stops reporting, a port fills up or an arrival time slips across the edge of a factory's production schedule. Then the ordinary dot on a map acquires a price. Someone calls a carrier. Someone else opens a spreadsheet. A customer asks for an answer that the logistics team does not yet have.
project44 built its name by making that dot less mysterious. The Chicago software company connects carriers, telematics systems, freight forwarders, ports and enterprise applications, then cleans their uneven signals into a view of freight moving by road, ocean, air, rail and parcel. The company says its network now touches more than 1.5 billion shipments a year for over 1,000 brands. Its preferred carrier network numbers roughly 280,000.
But shipment visibility is becoming table stakes. A red alert that sends a planner into four other systems is only a more punctual form of bad news. project44's current bet is that the valuable product is the loop after the alert: predict the exception, judge its importance, choose a response and carry out the work. The company calls that broader category Decision Intelligence. In plainer language, it wants the freight map to develop hands.
A plumbing company for freight
Founder and CEO Jett McCandless came to the problem from logistics, not from a consumer map. He founded project44 in 2014, when many freight transactions still traveled through phone calls, email, fax and aging electronic data interchange. The company's early product was a network of web-service APIs. Those pipes allowed a broker, shipper or transportation system to ask a carrier for a rate, book a load or receive a status update without custom work for every connection.
The name itself nods to Interstate 44, the freight corridor running from Texas through Oklahoma and Missouri. It is an unfussy origin for a company that has since raised roughly $1 billion and, in January 2022, was valued at $2.2 billion before the money in a $420 million investment. Its old X handle, @freightpipes, may still be the most accurate two-word description of the foundation.
That plumbing is the source of project44's differentiation. Logistics data arrives with missing fields, inconsistent identifiers, late pings and incompatible definitions. A generic AI model cannot infer that a silent truck has crossed a geofence or that a particular port delay threatens a particular order unless the events, locations, carriers and business rules have already been connected. project44's decade of integrations gives its software context before the model starts talking.
“We needed a supply chain platform that delivered actionable intelligence, not just visibility.”Nigel Wilkinson, global head of logistics, BAT
What the buyer actually buys
Movement, project44's main platform, now spans four practical domains. Visibility tracks inventory in transit and predicts arrival times across modes. Intelligent TMS plans loads, procures capacity, tenders freight, audits invoices and manages execution. Yard Management organizes appointments, gates, docks and trailers at facilities. The e-commerce product handles branded tracking, predicted delivery dates, customer alerts and distressed last-mile shipments.
The customer is usually a large shipper with enough complexity to make a missed handoff expensive: an automaker balancing parts, a chemical producer managing constrained lanes, a retailer coordinating parcels, or a food company watching time-sensitive inventory. Public customer material names BAT, Eastman Chemical, Pernod Ricard, Arkema, Blue Diamond Growers, Continental, Lenovo, AbbVie, Suntory Global Spirits and Prysmian. The users sit in transportation, logistics, procurement, customer service and supply-chain control towers.
The product loop
The problems are not exotic, which is why they recur. Planners waste hours on check calls. A warehouse staffs a dock for a truck that will not arrive. A manufacturer carries extra inventory because arrival data cannot be trusted. A retailer discovers a failed delivery only when the shopper complains. Finance pays detention, demurrage or inaccurate invoices. project44 tries to replace those buffers of labor, stock and anxiety with earlier information and a shorter path to action.
The business model is conventional enterprise SaaS. Companies subscribe to modules, integrate the platform with existing transportation, warehouse, order and enterprise systems, and typically sign multi-year contracts. Pricing is not public and varies by shipment volume, modes and deployment scope. Intelligent TMS can become the system of record, but project44 also sells it as an execution and intelligence layer beside SAP TM, Oracle OTM, Blue Yonder or Manhattan. That second route matters to a global company that would rather renovate than demolish.
The agents arrive at the loading dock
In 2026, project44 made AI agents the center of its product story. A freight procurement agent benchmarks rates and can run mini-bids. An execution recovery agent can detect a cancellation, seek replacement quotes and rebook. Other agents chase documents, onboard carriers, book facility slots and manage disruptions. Autopilot lets a customer determine when those agents may work, without commissioning a new engineering project for every rule.
The acquisition of LunaPath.ai in April 2026 added orchestration for jobs that require several steps rather than one suggestion. Three months later, project44 introduced Mo, a conversational analyst inside the platform. Mo is designed to answer questions against live operational data: which loads threaten a customer order, why on-time performance changed, or where dwell is accumulating. The chat box is the visible novelty. The less visible requirement is permissioned, reliable context beneath it.
project44 reported more than 160 Intelligent TMS customers and over $35 million in annual recurring revenue for the product by May 2026. It also said customers had seen a 4 percent reduction in transportation costs, a 17 percent increase in on-time performance and more than 60 percent less time spent quoting carriers. Those are vendor-reported results, not promises every buyer will reproduce. They do reveal the scorecard: not prettier tracking, but freight spend, service, labor and document accuracy.
A crowded control tower
FourKites is project44's closest direct rival in real-time transportation visibility. Descartes MacroPoint, Shippeo, Transporeon and e2open overlap, while SAP, Oracle, Blue Yonder and Manhattan sell adjacent transportation and supply-chain systems. The contest is widening as established vendors add AI and younger companies build agents for individual freight tasks.
project44's answer is breadth plus context. It combines multiple modes, a large carrier network, API-first connections, predictive ETAs, yards, last mile and transportation execution on one data model. The company says its agents are operating in production rather than living on a product roadmap. The tradeoff is familiar: a broad platform can reduce handoffs, but it also asks customers to place more operational weight on one vendor. Integrations, data quality and implementation discipline remain less glamorous than AI, and more likely to determine whether the software works on a wet Tuesday at a crowded gate.
Partnerships help it fit into systems customers already own. Google Cloud selected project44 as an early visibility provider for Supply Chain Twin. SAP integrations support shared customers such as Blue Diamond Growers. A 2025 partnership with data-integration company Lobster targeted faster joint deployments in automotive and consumer goods. Prysmian chose the platform for ocean visibility. project44 is not trying to replace every system around a shipment. It is trying to become the connective layer they consult.
Two buyers, finally two businesses
The cleanest evidence of project44's market position arrived in July 2026, when the company separated its logistics-service-provider offering into LSP44. Enterprise shippers buy applications such as TMS, visibility, yard management and last mile. Brokers, forwarders and 3PLs buy APIs and infrastructure to embed inside their own software, often under their own brand. Those customers have different sales cycles, product needs and economics.
“Shippers and LSPs don't buy the same thing, so we stopped pretending one business could serve both.”Jett McCandless, founder and CEO
The two companies retain a shared carrier network and logistics data spine, but have separate teams and roadmaps. project44 now speaks more clearly to the enterprise shipper; LSP44 sells agent and API infrastructure to the companies that move freight for others. It is a product-management decision disguised as corporate architecture, and a useful admission that a large network does not erase differences between buyers.
Meanwhile, project44's company culture borrows its vocabulary from execution. Employees are told to “roll up your sleeves,” “build trust through real talk,” “obsess over the customer” and “share the wheel.” The most memorable value is the “Say: Do Ratio,” a demand that action at least match declaration. More than half the workforce is outside the United States, with major hubs in Chicago, Bengaluru and Kraków. For a company selling coordination across borders, that distribution is both on-message and operationally demanding.
The useful distance between knowing and doing
project44 sits at the intersection of transportation management, supply-chain visibility and enterprise AI. Its first decade was about making fragmented freight legible. Its next chapter is about compressing the distance between knowing and doing. If a platform can see a disruption 48 hours earlier but nobody changes the booking, inventory plan or customer promise, the prediction is a well-timed shrug.
The company still has to prove that agentic logistics works reliably across messy companies with different rules and risk tolerances. Humans will not hand an expensive load to automation merely because the demo is smooth. They will ask who approved the reroute, what data supported it and how to reverse it. project44's emphasis on configurable controls is a response to that practical caution.
The larger lesson is less futuristic. Valuable automation begins with uncelebrated connective work: carrier relationships, permissions, normalized events, geofences, identifiers and exception rules. project44 spent years assembling that substrate while the market called it visibility. Now the company is trying to cash in that patience. The dot on the map still matters. It just needs somewhere useful to go next.
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