Donny Salazar is the founder and CEO of MasonHub, a software-led fulfillment and logistics company he started in 2018 to give fast-scaling beauty, wellness, and fashion brands the kind of order management and warehousing technology he wished he had earlier in his career. Before MasonHub he spent roughly two decades inside high-growth retail operations - COO of sneaker marketplace Flight Club, SVP of Operations at jewelry brand Chloe+Isabel, and a four-year run at Gilt Groupe where his supply-chain team helped scale revenue from $10M to over $500M. A Stanford MBA who once ran marketing at Revlon, Salazar built MasonHub around a headless, API-driven architecture and a bicoastal warehouse footprint, raising seed funding led by Canvas Ventures.
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.
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.
Boxbot is an Alameda, California robotics company building AI-enabled automated storage and parcel-handling systems for the supply chain. Its modular platform turns flat conveyors into three-dimensional, high-density storage that can store, sort, and sequence packages of varying sizes with minimal floor space. After pivoting from autonomous last-mile delivery vehicles, Boxbot now sells a hardware-and-software system aimed at last-mile delivery stations, 3PLs, air cargo, and cross-dock operations, promising faster vehicle loading and denser, more intelligent package flow at lower cost.
Cofactr is a New York-based software and logistics company that automates electronics procurement and supply chain operations for hardware manufacturers. Its cloud platform takes a team from bill of materials (BOM) to build by combining AI agents with ITAR-registered warehouses to handle sourcing, ordering, traceability, storage, kitting, and delivery. Cofactr is built for high-compliance, fast-moving industries such as aerospace, defense, robotics, and medical devices.
Augment builds Augie, an AI teammate purpose-built for logistics. The San Francisco company automates the phone calls, emails, portal logins, and back-office workflows that bog down freight brokers, shippers, and carriers - and has raised $110M in under a year to scale it.
HappyRobot is the AI-native operating system for the real economy, deploying autonomous AI workers that handle phone calls, emails, and complex operational tasks for logistics and supply chain enterprises. Founded in 2022 by Pablo Palafox, Luis Paarup, and Javier Palafox, the company emerged from Y Combinator S23 and has raised $62 million in total funding - including a $44M Series B led by Base10 Partners. HappyRobot's AI agents now serve 150+ enterprise customers including DHL, Ryder, Werner, and Schneider, automating millions of voice minutes and hundreds of thousands of emails annually, reducing appointment scheduling from a week to under 30 minutes and delivering collections ROI exceeding 100x.
Pallet is a San Francisco AI startup building an 'AI workforce' for the logistics industry. Its flagship product, CoPallet, automates back-office freight workflows - order entry, quoting, document parsing, portal updates - that have historically required armies of human operators. Founded in 2020 by ex-Retool engineer Sushanth Raman, the company serves freight brokers, 3PLs, warehouses and carriers including STG Logistics, Mallory Alexander, Knight, Swift and Lineage.
Justin Hall is Co-Founder and Chief Commercial Officer of Augment, a San Francisco-based AI startup building 'Augie' — an AI teammate purpose-built for logistics operations. With 25 years spent founding, scaling, and selling logistics companies, Hall has held executive roles at YRC Worldwide (a $5B LTL carrier), PRIMO Logistics, and his own firm Logistics Planning Services before it was acquired by GlobalTranz. At Augment, he helped raise $110M in under six months — a $25M seed round in early 2025 and an $85M Series A in September 2025 — to automate complex freight workflows end-to-end. Outside of logistics, Hall founded Change Starts with Me, a nonprofit supporting BIPOC founders and underserved communities in the Twin Cities.
Vimaan is a Silicon Valley computer vision and AI company that gives warehouses a 100% accurate, real-time view of their inventory. Using cameras, sensors, and proprietary algorithms, Vimaan automates receiving, put-away, cycle counting, picking, order validation, and shipping for 3PLs, brands, and retailers.
Dr. Srinivasan 'KG' Ganapathi is the founder and CEO of Vimaan Robotics, a Silicon Valley AI company deploying computer vision and machine learning to bring 100% inventory accuracy to warehouses. A serial entrepreneur with nearly 50 patents spanning magnetic recording, MEMS sensors, and supply chain digitization, Ganapathi previously founded Fidelica Microsystems (acquired by Lenovo) and Verreon Inc. (acquired by Qualcomm). With Vimaan, he is transforming how the world's largest 3PLs, retailers, and Fortune 10 companies track goods from dock to shelf - and became the first computer vision startup to receive investment from Amazon's $1 billion Industrial Innovation Fund.
Nimble is a San Francisco AI-robotics company building general-purpose warehouse robots and an autonomous fulfillment network that picks, packs, and ships e-commerce orders for brands like Puma, Adore Me, and Fresh Clean Threads.
Sushanth Raman is the co-founder and CEO of Pallet, a San Francisco-based AI company building an autonomous workforce for the logistics industry. Drawing on family roots in food distribution and stints at Microsoft, Google, and Retool, he founded Pallet in 2022 with fellow Retool engineer Andrew Spencer. The company has raised $50M total — including a $27M Series B led by General Catalyst in May 2025 — and its CoPallet platform automates the manual back-office operations (order entry, quoting, portal updates, shipment tracking) that still consume billions of dollars annually in a $12 trillion global logistics market.
Te (Thomas) Tang is Co-Founder and CEO of Anyware Robotics, a Fremont, California-based startup building AI-powered mobile robots for warehouse logistics. A UC Berkeley robotics PhD and founding member of FANUC's Silicon Valley research center, Tang combines deep academic research with industrial commercialization experience. His flagship robot, Pixmo, autonomously unloads shipping containers at 1,000 boxes per hour, won MHI's Best New Innovation award at ProMat 2025, and helps customers reduce receiving labor costs by up to 60%. In March 2025 Anyware Robotics closed a $12M seed round led by GFT Ventures, accelerating commercial deployments with leading third-party logistics providers.