shipping
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Yarden Gross and the art of seeing what comes next
A childhood on Lake Galilee, a detour through car diagnostics, and a surfing trip led Yarden Gross back to shipping. At Orca AI, his ambition for autonomous vessels begins with helping the people already on the bridge.
Five Months to Make a Go of It
Barbara Spector Yeninas turned a waterfront reporting beat into a business that reached its fiftieth anniversary. Along the way, she changed the guest list, mentored women and made room for a successor.
Kurt Wolf and the value hiding in the mail
He bought into Pitney Bowes, challenged its leadership, and joined its board. Now Kurt Wolf is running the company whose overlooked businesses he spent years asking investors to reconsider.
Rizwan Kermalli and the arithmetic of a small parcel
He began as a courier driver in New York. With eShipper, Rizwan Kermalli built a business around a useful proposition: small merchants become harder to overlook when their parcels travel together.
Ami Daniel and the trouble with a dot on a map
A former naval officer saw how little a ship’s position could tell you. Building Windward has meant learning to read the ocean - and learning when to stop acting like the captain.
Victor Maes and the price of the last click
He set out to help local brands sell online. The shipping bill changed the plan. At SuperFrete, Victor Maes is building a business around the moment a small seller’s customer decides whether to buy.
Anthony Dowd and the business of staying power
Paul Volcker recruited him during a financial crisis. Today, Anthony Dowd leads Fairfield-Maxwell, a family-owned enterprise whose investment horizon leaves room for another chapter.
Shyp Made Shipping Disappear. Then the Bills Arrived.
For a few dollars, Shyp would collect your unboxed item and make the post office someone else’s problem. The service found a better customer in eBay sellers, but it found that customer too late.
ShipServ and the paperwork behind $7 billion in ship supplies
An early dream of an eBay for ship supplies ran into customers who liked their own software. Connecting those systems became ShipServ’s business - and the foundation of a maritime trading network.
OneOcean puts the rulebook on the route
A ship can change course in minutes. Its paperwork has to keep up. OneOcean is building a maritime software business around that awkward gap, connecting navigation, compliance and the people who make the voyage happen.
Yasovardhan Chinni
Yasovardhan Chinni, known in the industry as YC, is a marine engineer turned entrepreneur who runs YC Ventures, a Dubai-based diversified investment group built around a maritime core. Starting from the engine room, he founded Nan Lian Ship Management in 2015 and expanded into commercial shipping, ship management, maritime fintech, marine e-commerce, and energy storage. Through YC Ventures he owns and operates a fleet of tankers, bulk carriers, and offshore vessels while backing ventures like ShipFinex, Shipskart, and Terranova Green Energy.
Topship
Topship is a Lagos-based digital freight forwarder that lets African businesses and individuals ship parcels, cargo and freight to and from more than 150 countries. Founded in 2020 and part of Y Combinator's Winter 2022 batch, it functions as an asset-light shipping layer - booking, tracking, insurance and, increasingly, an AI shipping assistant - aimed at the merchants who move goods across borders but were previously stuck with informal agents and opaque pricing.
YC Ventures
YC Ventures is a Dubai-based diversified investment company built on a maritime core. It owns and operates dry-bulk ships, manages technical and crew operations for a wider fleet, and recycles the returns into technology ventures spanning maritime fintech (Shipfinex), marine e-commerce procurement (Shipskart), lithium energy storage (Terranova), and youth leadership education. Led by Group CEO Yasovardhan Chinni, the group works across the UAE, India, Singapore, Nigeria and the USA under the operating idea of owning the asset, running the voyage, and compounding the capital into the next venture.
Ryan Petersen on AI, Logistics, and the Future of Flexport
In this episode of Y Combinator's podcast The Light Cone, Flexport founder and CEO Ryan Petersen explains how artificial intelligence is transforming global logistics. Petersen details how AI already saved 2% of Flexport's ocean freight spend while improving transit time 20%, how the company aims to make ocean container shipping 8-10% cheaper, and how AI agents now make phone calls, parse contracts, detect unhappy customers, and automate freight forwarding work. He also reflects on incumbency advantages in AI, his personal 'founder mode' evolution, capital discipline, and a sweeping philosophical vision of what automation means for humanity.
Outerspace
Outerspace is a brand-first third-party logistics (3PL) and fulfillment company that handles warehousing, picking, packing, kitting, shipping and returns for high-growth omnichannel consumer brands. Founded in late 2019 and headquartered in Carlstadt, New Jersey, it pairs dedicated on-site operations teams with its proprietary Mission Control order-management and shipping technology to turn fulfillment from a cost center into a growth lever. The company serves DTC and retail brands across apparel, home goods, beauty and CPG, and has raised more than $34 million, including a $30M Series B led by Prysm Capital in 2022.
Bearing AI
Bearing AI is a Palo Alto-based maritime technology company that builds AI models to predict and optimize how ships perform at sea. By combining real-world vessel sensor data, satellite positioning and weather with deep learning, its platform forecasts fuel consumption, emissions, fleet deployment and market conditions - helping shipping companies cut carbon output, comply with tightening emissions rules like CII, and make better operational decisions. Founded in 2019 by Dylan Keil and David Liu and backed by Andrew Ng's AI Fund and Mitsui & Co., Bearing counts leading carriers such as 'K' Line, Hapag-Lloyd and IINO Lines among its users.
GearLaunch
GearLaunch is a print-on-demand commerce platform that lets entrepreneurs design, sell, and ship custom products without holding inventory or paying upfront. Sellers handle the creative and marketing; GearLaunch handles production, printing, fulfillment, payment processing, and worldwide shipping across a catalog of thousands of customizable items.
Shipwell
Shipwell is an Austin-based software company building an AI-integrated transportation management system (TMS) that unifies shipment planning, real-time visibility, automation, and settlement in one cloud platform. Founded in 2016 by Greg Price and Jason Traff, it helps shippers and logistics teams across food & beverage, manufacturing, and distribution move freight with less manual work. After selling its brokerage arm to CloudTrucks in 2024, Shipwell now operates as a pure-play SaaS provider and has been named a Visionary in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for TMS for five consecutive years.
Albert Ko
Albert Ko is the CEO of Auctane, the Austin-based shipping software powerhouse behind ShipStation, Stamps.com, ShipEngine, and Metapack. A Korean immigrant who arrived in Los Angeles speaking Korean and Farsi but no English, Ko climbed from McKinsey consultant to Yale/Harvard-educated operator who grew Zelle into the largest peer-to-peer payments network by dollar volume — then took the helm at Auctane in June 2023 to bring operational discipline to one of the most consequential companies in global e-commerce logistics.
Narvar
Narvar is a San Mateo-based enterprise SaaS platform that owns the 'post-purchase' moment for retailers - the stretch between checkout and a customer's next order. Its software powers order tracking, delivery notifications, returns, exchanges and fraud prevention for 1,500+ brands including Sephora, Gap, Patagonia, Home Depot, Levi's and Sonos, and has handled billions of consumer interactions across 38+ countries.
Ryan Petersen
Ryan Petersen is the founder and CEO of Flexport, the technology-driven freight forwarding company he built from a Y Combinator batch into an $8 billion global logistics giant. A serial entrepreneur who started importing goods from China at 17, he previously co-founded ImportGenius and has become one of the most influential voices in supply chain and trade policy - most famously by renting a boat to tour the LA port congestion in 2021 and posting a viral Twitter thread that prompted California's governor to call him directly. He is also a venture partner at Peter Thiel's Founders Fund.