He helped grow a logistics software business from $2 million to more than $20 million in recurring revenue. Then Jesse Buckingham gave up the established operation to tackle the work still hiding in freight brokers’ inboxes.

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.