The Houston software company that treats the loading yard - trucking's most ignored real estate - as a problem worth solving.
Above: the Velostics mark. Behind it, a wager that the dullest square footage in logistics - the yard between the truck and the warehouse door - is where the real money hides.
It is a Tuesday at a distribution center, and the yard is doing what yards do best: waiting. A driver has arrived early. A dock is occupied. A dispatcher is on hold. A trailer sits somewhere in the back lot, full, forgotten, quietly accruing detention fees by the hour. Multiply that scene across every warehouse in America and you have a multi-billion-dollar traffic jam that nobody put on a map. This is the exact stretch of asphalt Velostics decided to care about.
Velostics is a logistics SaaS company, founded in Houston in 2019, that builds software for the part of the supply chain the glossy brochures skip. Not the ocean freight. Not the last-mile drone. The yard - the messy handoff between transportation and distribution - where trucks meet docks and coordination usually means a clipboard and a landline. The company's pitch is disarmingly narrow and, therefore, credible: unify the scheduling, digitize the gate, and let AI agents do the calling.
"Reimagine dock and yard management for growing businesses by closing the gap between transportation and distribution with AI agents."
— Velostics, on what it is forVelostics is the second act of Gaurav Khandelwal, who has run the Houston software firm ChaiOne since 2009. His turning point, by his own telling, was the 2008 launch of the Apple App Store - the moment software stopped being a thing on a desk and became a thing in your hand, and on your forklift, and at your gate. ChaiOne built digital products grounded in behavioral science. Velostics took that instinct and pointed it at freight.
Khandelwal has been named to the Houston Business Journal's 40 Under 40 and was a finalist for EY Entrepreneur of the Year. The through-line from ChaiOne to Velostics is not the industry - it is the belief that the friction people tolerate as "just how it works" is usually a design problem in disguise.
The yard is not a technology problem people forgot to solve. It is a technology problem people decided was too boring to solve.
— The Velostics thesis, paraphrasedThe product line reads like a set of keys, each cut for a different door in the same building. You do not have to buy all of them - which is part of the point.
Intelligent appointment scheduling that puts shippers, carriers and consignees on one calendar.
Contactless, digital gate check-in with purchase-order validation and driver confirmation.
Automatic dock scheduling and customer pickup coordination to cut dwell time.
AI-driven trailer management and spotter task automation across on- and off-site lots.
Supplier pickup and customer delivery scheduling, powered by a Voice AI agent.
The core AI orchestration layer that stitches gate, dock, yard and scheduling together.
Most logistics software ends at the screen. Somebody still has to pick up the phone. In 2025, Velostics partnered with Chai, a Houston AI agency, to change that with an agentic AI Voice Agent - software that makes and receives actual phone calls to book, reschedule and confirm appointments, wave drivers through the gate, and hand out yard instructions. The dispatcher's least favorite task, delegated to a machine that never gets tired of being on hold.
The claim underneath it is bigger than convenience: an agent that adjusts scheduling in real time as weather, traffic and dock congestion shift, so the plan updates itself before a human notices it broke. That is the difference between software that records what happened and software that decides what happens next.
Figures are company-stated targets, not audited results. Read them as ambition with a spreadsheet.
Velostics has raised roughly $7.5M - deliberately lean for a company selling into the enterprise. The backers skew Midwestern and Texan rather than Sand Hill Road.
Estimated ARR ~$1.8M and valuation ~$5.3M per third-party trackers - unofficial, treat as approximate.
Velostics sells to manufacturers, beverage companies, distributors and 3PLs - operations where a trailer sitting in the wrong spot costs real money.
The platform is designed to sit alongside the systems a warehouse already runs - TMS, WMS and ERP - rather than replace them.
Gaurav Khandelwal spins Velostics out of the ChaiOne orbit to attack yard and dock scheduling.
Flyover Capital leads, with Cultivation Capital, Starboard Star, Small Ventures USA and others.
Starboard Star leads a follow-on with Flyover Capital and new investor Capital Mazapil.
The unified scheduling platform expands into full AI-driven yard management.
Agentic voice AI starts making and taking the scheduling calls dispatchers used to dread.
Same distribution center, same asphalt. A truck rolls to the gate and the barrier lifts before the driver reaches for a phone - the check-in already happened, digitally, on the way in. A dock number waited in a text message. The trailer in the back lot did not get forgotten; a spotter got the task before it aged into a fee. Nobody was on hold, because the call that used to eat an afternoon was answered by an agent that does not mind repetition. The yard is doing something yards rarely do. It is keeping up.
That is the wager Velostics made on the least fashionable square footage in logistics - that the boring middle of the supply chain was never boring, just neglected. The company is small, the funding is lean, and the loading dock will never trend. But quietly, one gate at a time, the waiting is getting shorter.
Velostics - the quiet software running behind the loudest part of the supply chain.