logistics-automation
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Sola wants to retire your copy-and-paste career
A screen recording becomes a bot. Behind Sola’s simple proposition is a bet that the people doing the paperwork should be able to automate it themselves.
Prism Logistix Added 20 AI Agents—and Kept Hiring
With 20,000 customer rules threatening its growth, Prism Logistix put Pallet’s AI agents to work across the freight back office. It reports a 10% net-margin improvement, faster employee ramp-up, and more hiring in sales and account management.
Eassons’ 98% Touchless Load Entry Started With Recipe Cards
A recipe-card holder held the customer rules that kept Eassons’ freight moving. Teaching those rules to a Pallet agent turned a fragile store of human knowledge into 98% touchless load building.
Pallet Fabric Gives AI the Keys to AS/400
The hardest part of enterprise AI is getting through the door. Pallet Fabric connects agents to green screens, TMS software, inboxes, and portals so they can finish the work where it already lives.
The Tape That Wanted to Run the Supply Chain
A shipping label is a modest place to put an operating system. Trackonomy built one there anyway - then bought the chip and label businesses needed to make the idea travel.
The Check Call Bot Can Save Time and Still Lose the Carrier
AI voice agents can chase a truck’s status, ETA and dock time. The harder question for freight teams is when the call should end with a person - and whether carriers will want to answer again.
The Inbox That Learned to Move Freight
Freight still runs on the most advanced network of 1998: the inbox, the phone and somebody remembering what to do next. Vooma began by teaching software to survive that chaos - then discovered the clerical mess was the market.
Jeff Tan Learned the Freight Business One Stubborn Document at a Time
Before he helped automate freight paperwork, Jeff Tan lived with its consequences. His route from Philippine forwarding floors to a San Francisco startup explains why Expedock was built around operations, not spectacle.
The Company That Hired the Missing Middle
BackOps found a lucrative place to put AI: the awkward stretch between spotting a supply-chain problem and actually fixing it. Its agents do not merely point at the fire - they gather the paperwork, cross the portals, ask for approval, and close the loop.
Pallet Wants Your AI to Know Your Freight—and Nobody Else’s
In logistics, the same words can trigger entirely different moves. Pallet’s answer is a private model for every customer—paired with an inspectable Memory layer, portable model choices and security built to keep operating knowledge in its owner’s hands.
How Lineage Put 2 Million Logistics Workflows on Autopilot
Inside the cold-chain giant’s 49-day sprint from manual data entry to AI agents that read messy freight documents, build orders and make judgment calls at operator-level accuracy.
Mallory Alexander Turned Import Paperwork Into $18M
Mallory Alexander automated three high-stakes import workflows with Pallet—and tripled files handled per operator while reporting 100% filing accuracy. The result: $18 million in enterprise value and a sharper blueprint for scaling without matching growth dollar for dollar with headcount.
Pallet’s Five Rules for Letting AI Agents Take the Wheel
AI agents can move freight work faster, but autonomy without boundaries is just a faster way to make expensive mistakes. Pallet’s governance playbook shows how to give software real authority without giving up control.
The 40-Year-Old Software Company Running the Boring, Expensive Parts of Trucking
McLeod Software survived four decades by obsessing over the unglamorous handoffs where freight companies lose time and money. Now the Birmingham firm is wiring AI, smart trailers, and driverless trucks into the same operating system.
Kaleris Wants to Fix the Places Where Freight Forgets to Move
The freight industry has plenty of dashboards. Kaleris is betting that the bigger prize is software that decides what should move next - from a truck at the gate to a crane in a container yard.
Two Robots Walk Into a Freight Brokerage
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.
One Tells You the Price. The Other Does the Job.
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.
Passage
Passage is an AI co-pilot for customs brokers and freight forwarders that automates the tedious paperwork of clearing imported goods. Founded in 2024 by former Google and Flexport engineers Terrell Marshall and Aditya Nadkarni, and backed by Y Combinator's S24 batch, the software reads commercial invoices, bills of lading, and packing lists, checks them for consistency, classifies products under HTSUS tariff codes, drafts filings, and handles routine email correspondence - work that entry writers otherwise do by hand for hours each day.
VersaFleet
VersaFleet is a Singapore-based transport management software (TMS) company that helps businesses automate and optimise last-mile delivery. Its cloud SaaS handles route planning, dispatch, driver and vehicle assignment, electronic proof-of-delivery, real-time job tracking and automated customer notifications. Founded in 2012 by Shamir Rahim, the platform serves FMCG distributors, third-party logistics providers, waste-management operators and staff-transport companies across ASEAN, powering thousands of drivers for firms that deliver on behalf of Fortune 500 brands.
Apptronik
Apptronik is an Austin-based robotics company building Apollo, a general-purpose humanoid robot designed to work alongside people in manufacturing, logistics and other physically demanding settings. Spun out of the University of Texas at Austin's Human Centered Robotics Lab in 2016, the company grew from custom actuator work for NASA into one of the most heavily funded humanoid robot developers, with commercial pilots at Mercedes-Benz and GXO and an AI partnership with Google DeepMind's Gemini Robotics team.
The Freight Back Office Is Up for Grabs — And Everyone Wants Pallet's Lunch
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.
Boon
Boon builds AI agents that automate the paperwork-heavy back office of physical industries. Founded in 2023 by ex-Samsara product leader Deepti Yenireddy, the San Mateo company first launched a workflow platform for commercial fleets - handling order entry, load sourcing, compliance and fuel optimization - and has since pushed into construction, where its agents run preconstruction workflows from blueprint to bid, including takeoffs, clash detection and bid leveling. Boon raised $20.5M across seed and a $15.5M Series A led by Redpoint Ventures and Marathon in December 2024.
Cogniac Corporation
Cogniac Corporation is a Silicon Valley company building an enterprise-grade, no-code computer vision platform that lets non-experts train and deploy AI models on visual data. Founded in 2015 by Ruckus Wireless veteran Bill Kish and Amy Wang, Cogniac turns cameras and images into operational insight - inspecting products, detecting defects, monitoring safety, and automating document handling across manufacturing, transportation, automotive, government, and logistics. Backed by roughly $46M from investors including National Grid Partners, Cisco Investments, and Autotech Ventures, it counts BNSF Railway, Ford, Georgia-Pacific, Doosan Bobcat, and Trimac among its customers.
MiChamba
MiChamba is a Mexico-founded startup that turns WhatsApp into an operational management platform for frontline and deskless teams across Latin America and the US Hispanic market. Instead of forcing workers onto a new app, it layers AI agents - led by an assistant named MarIA - on top of the messaging tool people already use, converting informal chats into trackable tasks, reports, and productivity data. It raised a $2.25M pre-seed round in 2025 and counts Hilton, Pemex, and Repsol among 50+ customers in construction, hospitality, logistics, and industrial sectors.
Rhoda AI
Rhoda AI is a Palo Alto robotics company building foundation models that teach robots to act in the messy physical world by learning from internet-scale video instead of staged lab demos. Its FutureVision system - a Direct Video Action (DVA) model - watches an environment, predicts what happens next, and converts those predictions into motion in a closed loop that updates every few hundred milliseconds. Founded in 2024 and out of stealth in March 2026 with a $450M Series A at a $1.7B valuation, Rhoda targets high-variability manufacturing and logistics work.
Yibiao Zhao
Yibiao Zhao is the co-founder and CEO of ISEE, an MIT spin-off in Cambridge, Massachusetts that builds self-driving yard trucks powered by a 'humanistic' AI grounded in cognitive science. A UCLA PhD in computer vision and former MIT postdoc in Joshua Tenenbaum's Computational Cognitive Science Group, Zhao bet that machines need common sense, not just pattern recognition, to navigate the messy real world. ISEE became the first company to run fully autonomous operations in logistics yards, completing more than 10,000 self-driving trailer moves for customers like Maersk and Lazer Spot, and raised $40 million in a 2022 Series B led by Founders Fund.
ISEE
ISEE is an MIT spinout building humanistic, AI-powered self-driving yard trucks that automate the repetitive, dangerous work of moving trailers inside logistics yards and port terminals. Its autonomy system is grounded in cognitive-science ideas like theory of mind, letting trucks reason about intent and handle the unpredictable chaos of a working yard. ISEE claims to be the first company to reach fully autonomous operations in the yard-truck space, with customers including Maersk and Lazer Spot.
Pickle Robot Company
Pickle Robot Company builds Physical AI systems that autonomously unload trucks, trailers, and import containers of non-palletized goods at human-scale or better. Founded in 2018 and based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Pickle pairs a multi-camera vision system with generative AI foundation models trained on millions of real warehouse data points, mounting a KUKA arm on a custom mobile base that drives into a trailer and clears it in roughly 90 minutes. The company is on a mission to automate inbound and outbound work at one million warehouse doors over the next decade.
Burmester & Vogel
Burmester & Vogel is a Boston-based maritime technology company that uses AI and machine learning to automate laytime calculation and demurrage claim management for the shipping industry. Founded in Hamburg in 1983 as a traditional laytime firm, it has reinvented itself as the maker of the Demurrage AI Copilot - software that digitizes shipping documents, calculates delay time, and audits demurrage claims in seconds. It serves industrial producers, commodity traders, bulk terminals and shipowners across several hundred companies worldwide.
ThredUp
ThredUp is one of the world's largest online resale platforms for secondhand women's and children's apparel, shoes and accessories. Founded in 2009, the Oakland-based company combines automated distribution centers, a managed marketplace, and a 'Resale-as-a-Service' (RaaS) platform that powers branded resale programs for major retailers. It went public on Nasdaq in 2021 under ticker TDUP and frames its mission around extending the life of clothing to reduce fashion's environmental footprint.