project44 became the one API between 142,000 carriers and every shipper

Global freight is a visibility disaster by design: one shipment crosses truckers, rail, ports, forwarders and parcel couriers, each running its own systems. Shippers historically learned where freight was by phone calls and EDI messages that stopped at every handoff — Gartner found just 21% of experts had no trouble with visibility. In 2014 Jett McCandless and Wally Ibrahim founded project44: an API platform acting as 'the connecting tissue' between carriers, third-party logistics providers, shippers and their supply chain systems, delivering real-time information such as predictive ETAs.

The design choice was to be neutral plumbing rather than a marketplace. project44 integrated carriers once into its network — by 2022 more than 142,000 multimodal carrier integrations and 2.7 million trucks, with coverage of all major ELD and telematics devices across air, parcel, final-mile, LTL, truckload, rail, intermodal and ocean. A shipper subscribing once could track across every mode and region: visibility in 166 countries. The aggregate data fed machine-learning ETAs, with exception management on top so problems surfaced before customers noticed.

The market paid for it. In May 2021 project44 raised $202 million of equity at a $1.2 billion valuation; in January 2022 it raised another $420 million led by Thoma Bravo, TPG and Goldman Sachs at a $2.2 billion pre-money valuation — a funding record for logistics-tech enterprise SaaS. Annual recurring revenue passed $100 million with 70% subscription gross margin and 133% net retention, and customers including Amazon, Nestlé, Yamato Transport, HARIBO and The Home Depot. Through 2021 it bought Convey for last-mile visibility, Ocean Insights for cargo at sea, and ClearMetal for AI-driven ETA.

Why the middle layer wins: carrier integrations are the expensive, messy part of freight software, and no shipper or carrier wants to build thousands of them. project44 did the work once and charges everyone for access, a classic network effect — each new carrier makes the service better for all shippers, each new shipper makes connection worth more to carriers. Rivals such as FourKites and Shippeo attack the same problem, but the network that reaches critical mass first becomes the industry's default railroad for freight data.

One API layer connecting all carriers at once

Freight tracking was a many-to-many integration problem, and a neutral middle layer reduces it to two one-time integrations

Carriers are small and fragmented, so no single shipper had the leverage to make them build custom integrations

Pooled tracking data from millions of shipments made ETA predictions better than any one participant's data could

The 2020-22 supply chain crisis turned 'where is my freight' from a convenience into a board-level resilience requirement

When an industry is too fragmented for any two parties to integrate, sell the translation layer. Own the connections and you own the data exhaust, which compounds into a product no one firm can build.

project44 was ranked first on the 2022 FreightTech 25 and named a Leader in Gartner's 2021 Magic Quadrant for real-time transportation visibility platforms, and founder Jett McCandless told Bloomberg the company would 'probably pursue a traditional initial public offering' after targeting $170 million ARR. Real-time visibility went from novel to table stakes across the industry, with FourKites, Shippeo and SAP-backed offerings fighting for the same market. The company kept expanding beyond trucks into ocean, parcel and returns, effectively becoming the telemetry layer for global supply chains.