FreightWaves Today | September 14

0:00Toyota presents its new all-electric family. The VZ, perfect for enjoying time with friends, the VZ Woodland, the adventurer, and the CHR with its sporty style. Toyota's new all-electric family, there's nothing left to think about. We've had some insightful interviews recently on automation with the industry leaders, and we've put together some great voices in this special edition of Freightwaves Today. The future is coming. Take a look. Welcome to Freightwaves Today, how are you, sir? So, you are the first cabless autonomous semi-truck. What does this mean? Is this one of those? I've seen the videos of these sort of futuristic, I think in China, they're more common. I've actually, you know, sort of feels like a little, and I'm going to use this term,

1:00and I mean this kindly, dystopian world of not having a cab. It's what it feels like to an old-school trucker. What is this? I know what, what is exactly is this? Yeah, and you're right, they're actually already in China, so they're already deploying these sort of, what we call, skateboards or platforms for moving Freight. It's not a dystopian future. It's advanced, and of technology is the way I see it, and it's just another tool and a toolkit, right? So, it's not changing the way trucks work, or displacing trucks, or anything like that. It's just one more way to move Freight, especially if you have a generally short move that you need to do, these skateboard concepts are really great when you do it. So, what is, so we've seen them, I don't know if we've got any b-roll on this, but the idea that you don't need basically a cab, it's basically the chassis itself is powered, and it strikes me that that is probably what this ends up in the future, because they're just far more capital efficient. Once you eliminate the need for a driver to be in the cab,

2:03why would you even have a cab? Yeah, and I think that's where Humble Robogs kind of got to start. We were asking ourselves, based on where technology is and where it's going, what does a truck look like? And, but where does commercial trucking go in the far future, and can we bring that in sooner? You know, the trucks that we are, they're on the road, we're never designed to be autonomous, right? So, they were designed for a human driver to sit in the cab and drive and be safe and pilot that vehicle. So, so the question we're asking ourselves is, where does that all go? And eventually it goes to these purpose-built vehicles, vehicles designed with autonomy in mind, not just bolting on sensors to the top of the vehicle, like you see with some of the autonomous truck providers out there. And so that's where Humble sits. We're, we're trying to look at that future and bring that in closer and see what we can do to design that vehicle for a Tommy from Japan. So, one of the things I was having this conversation with somebody who's been in the industry for decades, and we were talking about the fact that, you know, the concept of drop trailers is something that

3:04the industry is really the larger carriers that built their entire business model on having dropped trailers. But in an autonomous world, particularly when you have these skateboard concepts for autonomous, you don't need drop trailers. All of a sudden you're going to drop these skateboards off and the containers can get loaded and offloaded that way. Where does this end up? Yeah, so this is a great question because if you think about a skateboard that doesn't, you know, that's just sitting at a customer's site, for example, waiting for a doctor to open, right? It's well timed and well cost-vers actually very low, right? So the benefit of drop trailers starts to go away in a time in the future. You could just have what our vision is, a vehicle that shows up at a dock, loads, and drives to destination, unloads, and it just does that back and forth all day, kind of on demand on call. It's a different model for freight for how it'll progress in time, but it's kind of where it goes in the time of the future. Drop trailers work really well, where you have a driver trying to optimize their time and trying to make sure that the driver's stuck waiting

4:07for a doctor to open anything like that. But if you're able to sort of manage the vehicle and call it on one hand and deliver it to the destination, it changes the model entirely. That's what we believe. I've been told that at scale, the price point for these skateboard concepts, I'd love to get your talk about it. So around $100,000 is probably where they end up in the market. Do you have any concepts on what you expect the technology, what you guys expect the market price to be? Yeah, so it can get even lower than that at scale, right? I mean, if you think about what a platform looks like, there's not much there, right? There's a way to power the axles and there's a battery pack. There's the autonomous technology. So at, you know, in time at high volume, we can go in and park a little under day. So I mean, I mean, a full trailer, a 50-foot trailer is, you know, 50-60,000 these days. You're talking about something that is we're starting to get the price point. If, you know, once we get to maturity, I'm using today's adjusted dollars because

5:09there's no foreign inflation is going to do to everything around us. But what you're talking about is the price point between a sort of an empty dumb box of 50-foot trailer and one of these skateboard concepts. The price delta is within range. I mean, is that the future that you would expect? Yeah, in time. I mean, not today, right? Because I think we have to develop technology and get it to the right price point. And we have to get the volume sub on it to see that kind of pricing, right? There's millions of trailers out there, right? And so the price point there is fairly low. But they are creeping up, right? 50-60,000 now for the 53-foot drive-in. In time, yeah, if you think about what is in these vehicles, it's fairly simple, right? That's the whole idea is that, you know, the movement of freight can get very simple in a time of the future. I'm just making an assumption. I imagine that the more simple the solution is and the equipment is, the less the maintenance costs are and all of the things as well. Electric. I mean, one of the

6:10well-documented things about electric vehicles is that they don't have the maintenance. There's less to break. There's less, I mean, just less moving parts, you know, talking about like one tenth of the moving parts in an electric vehicle versus a a turtle combustion engine. I mean, now there are sensors and all of those things that I'm sure. I mean, it is a computer, right? Even the electric vehicles have full, I mean, even the internal combustion engines or diesels. I'm not sure if we have all of those sensors. Yeah, they have sensors. They're all, it's all headed. Yeah, it's the difference between combustion, you know, thousands of times a minute for, you know, just motors moving and batteries that are well understood. The maintenance of these vehicles is going to go down tremendously. Even the sensor is kind of newer technology, but there's not a lot of moving parts in them, right? And moving parts are usually what causes a lot of maintenance havoc for us. And fluids, you got fluid issues, you got a lot of stuff that you don't have. Yes. So you gave us sort of the example of the future, you know, being one of these units goes in loads, unloads, goes to some excistration loads,

7:12unloads. So tell us more about what that future looks like with the actual amount of human intervention needed or not needed at loading and unloading and why that short haul, dock to dock freight is probably what the future looks like. Yeah, so, you know, I think humans will be involved for a while, right? It's even if you're getting the driving portion of the move done autonomously, they're still, yeah, there's loading and unloading. We have a remote oversight of the vehicles, right? So there are still CDL holders who are watching the vehicles remotely. And so you'll have that kind of touch point. There's still maintenance, there's still inspection requirements, right? All the, all the laws of trucks still apply, right? So we have to be sure that those are being met. Where the vision goes, you know, where we look at the far future though, to me, it's these warehouses that are automated. It's voting, unloading, they're automated, and the freight moving automated. And you have an entire supply chain link automated all the way through. That's the far future, you know, in the interim, we still have, you know, a lot of human touch

8:14involved meetings or make sure it operations work, et cetera. So I'll, in terms of timing, I know you get tired of this question because I get tired of everybody whenever I go on a, any kind of network, that's when is autonomous trucks happening? I know you get asked that all the time, but would love for our audience to get a sense for what timing you think will start to see point to point transportation. So I started working on autonomous trucks in 2016, which is about as all-distance industry is, right? And, you know, we thought it was always a couple of years away, right? But we're working, we're talking about something that is very safety, critical, right? We have to work within existing operations. There's trucking is fascinating, it's awesome, and it's complicated, right? So you have to make sure that all works well, that the regulatory laws. So it took time and it's taking time. But yeah, I would say the time is trucking is just about here. You know, it's already, you know, you see companies like Kodiak, they're doing their operations off road, but they're doing it. Aurora has got their, their, their, their back-and-force in the highway.

9:15So every year we get closer and closer to adoption, and then at some point that means, it's really complex. So I think it's time that trucking is more or less here. It just took, you know, about a decade to get the technology working right. So I want to get your thoughts on something that I've been talking about, and I've been talking about it for years, but, but I'd love to get your thought about sort of this evolution. The question, you know, one of the reasons the trucking market is so fragmented is because of the truck driver. It's the primary reason the market's so fragmented. But once we enter an autonomous world where autonomous vehicles argue big what is, it strikes me that the fragmentation starts to go away over time where it's technology that wins out. And this happens in every mature industry where you have technology winners. You can look at it as search, you know, a lot of the modern, and I know this running a media business is, it is very hard for us to compete for dollars against Google, Facebook, Instagram, all the different platforms because they've taken the predominance of dollars. And the only way to survive is to sort of

10:18carve out niches like freightwaves where the platforms will never compete against you. You still have this sort of competition. It strikes me that trucking probably ends up in this way too. And the question is for freight brokers specifically, what happens in a world where autonomous trucks, because really the freight brokers advantage is that the fragmentation works to their to ascension the market. But in an autonomous world, those arms start to go away. Thoughts there. Yeah, that's a great question. I see things centralizing over time. And the fragmentation is kind of a consequence of how trucking has formed over 100 years. But it's not what you see in other industries. You don't see this kind of extreme fragmentation and a lot of parties are involved in the process and moving for a, I think technology will bring that to bear and there'll be a lot of centralization for sure. There's, it's just the trend that you see basically in every other industry. And your example of media, I think, is appropriate. I think that's very

11:21fragmented in starting centralize a little bit. There'll always be this sort of niche market. And I think trucking has a lot of niche markets, right? Like you can do it to the fore, so you go into ice run. There's always sort of new domains that kind of require that there will still be a little bit more fragmented, but for the bulk of it, it'll be centralized. I, you know, it's interesting, Julie, I think the asset based, the large asset based carriers that cannot adopt the technology quickly are going to get completely wiped out. And I think that's the mid market carriers that are at the most at risk. I think it's true in the brokerage too, unless you have a niche. So it's interesting because I think what we're going to see is we're going to see the largest brokers are probably well positioned. They have the capital. They know how to market like you think about it. They're much better marketing agencies than a lot of the asset guys. You know, most of the asset guys spend their time on maintenance and driver recruiting. That's where they win. And an autonomous EV world maintenance and driver recruiting is not a factor. So large asset carriers have a lot at risk

12:23in an autonomous world if they don't adapt technology. They get to move their business models. Large brokers are well positioned in my opinion. Now the mid market brokers, I think, and smaller, I think it becomes, I had to use the term deadman walking. Yeah, I think it is something that is going to be very hard for a lot of people to adapt to and and I guess. Why do I need it? And I know I'm going to go a lot of hate on this one, but what do I need a freight broker if I can access a network directly? If I have a shipper can access a an autonomous vehicle. And there's no more driver safety concerns. I don't have driver safety or driver compliance. You're probably going to have a dimmification. Maybe humble. I assume you guys would be selling this equipment to some third party versus actually running the trucks yourself. I don't know what I all have that's your thoughts. So there can be a third party that has the trucks and has the equipment. And then it's a really a contest of capital and marketing. I mean, that's really I mean data sciences there as well. But with AI, those models get

13:27into my next piece to understand the shippers. So that's the one part. Is the shippers still going to continue to have very different requirements? Okay, but doesn't the larger asset carriers that understand these models? Don't they have the advantages? Absolutely. That's what I'm saying. But if you think of like that's really the only differentiator, right? If you think about understand your specific customers needs and then can adapt to this technology to meet them. But most mid-market mid-sized motor carriers have made their business and have succeeded because they have the ability to hire and retain truck drivers. And they know how to maintain trucks. And in autonomous world, that is less important. In fact, it might be a disadvantage to you because all of your advantages are on those things. I don't know. I margin out of those things where others can't that are no longer going to be. Like those the mid-market carriers and smaller carriers succeed. A guy with 50 trucks exists either because he has a strong relationship with one or two major customers. Or because he's figured out some way to recruit and retain drivers in a way that larger care,

14:33they have personal relationships with every truck driver. In the opposite world, that isn't a factor anymore. I think that the carriers, the ones that we work with, they have great relationships with their customers, the shippers, and the others that broke theirs. And I think that's important to stay. If that still matters, users and new requirements. And aside from the drivers, they also know how to maintain the assets. And they know how to manage the asset pool and maintain it. And I think those are still necessary skills. And there's going to be other aspects to autonomous driving. There's maintaining sensors. There is remote monitoring of the operations. You guys are talking about Carbaffft and your previous segment. That becomes an interesting question in the autonomous world. Somebody has to really be on top of that. So I think those carriers have the capacity to manage those functions still. And I think that's where it goes. So here's the thing I think we'll see. And I think we'll start to see this in within five years. Once we see autonomous, I think the well, the very successful freight brokers

15:34wind up buying asset to get that maintenance optimization sort of pedigree. I mean, first of all, freight brokers tend to be a lot more financially successful in the market than the large assets assets. It's the very capital intensive business. They have better balance sheets. I think they'll I think we'll end up seeing this in consolidation where the better capitalized brokers will end up buying assets because they don't have. I mean, Doug Wagner, the CEO of Echo says it best. Most brokers do not know how to run trucks so I've ended on it. Well, the same way that they get into the trailer market, right? They started buying assets as trailers to. Well, they made the mistake. But they didn't know how to manage. They did not manage it. I mean, they're going to plan these assets appropriately to drive full utilization. Here's my here's my thing. And I told Dan Lewis this years ago that if I were him, I'd go buy a large asset basically, founder of Convoy. I'd go buy a large asset. Take that $4 billion valuation and use it to buy an asset carrier. For their talent.

16:40Well, how to run systems. How to run networks and how to run trailers. Two things that they did not understand and rest in peace, Convoy. Because when you buy or release thousands of trailers, then you don't have someone on staff and is that a operator? There's a trailer's efficiently. It becomes a capital drain. That's what they should have done. They should have used their massive, massive market position to buy an asset. They could have bought USA truck when it was trusted. Who would have bought US Express? Maybe. I'm saying that as a, no, actually, it's that idea to Dan Lewis. I was like, you know, I should buy US Express. Anyway. Yeah. Well, I think there's always that kind of what are you an expert in? And we're experts in. The time is driving and developing a truck. I think you can't be an expert at everything. That's one of the challenges I think of this business. There's so much to it. Issues challenging. We're seeing this in venture capital out in the valley. A lot of venture

17:47capitalists are now doing roll ups of buying traditional unattractive businesses from V.C. to roll them up. Agencies are a good example. That's consulting businesses. Another good example. With the thesis that if they roll them up, then they can use AI to cut a lot of the, you know, a lot of their, make the business more efficient. You know, economics gains their AI. So I can see a world where the non-asset based carriers say, hey, I want the knowledge of how to run equipment. That's something that is not natural for someone that's in a non-asset based work. I can see them making the case to go by a mid-market well-ran asset based carrier. Yeah. I mean, well, things are changing rapidly, but you know, the you still have to ask whether a venture capital term can run effectively a truck operation, right? We haven't seen it yet. I mean, it's fair as well. I would say it's a thesis, right?

18:49It's a good one. I mean, I'm just going to have to. Look, those that can't do do or sitting here talking on the freightways today. So I, it's easy for me to sit there and play money board a quarterback and guess what's going to happen because I don't actually have to go do it. I have the benefit of being, you know, I don't have to prove it out, but it does strike me as a really intriguing set of conditions that the world's going to change. We don't know what it's going to look like, but my view is that that we're going to see massive consolidation that comes out of the autonomous world regardless of what it comes to. I think it's going to be some interesting marriages that come about. Yeah, we see the same. We agree. So I'll thanks for coming in and joining us on freightway study. I want to have you back as we see this. You got to bring some B-roll with you, brother. I want to do it next time. Next time. We'll get some obelisk autonomous truck things. You've seen these things in China, right? These weird like, they just look weird to like boxes and things. Here we have some.

19:54There it is. Is this it? That's it. I love it. It's cool. It's cool. I need one for the museum, but most of the museum needs one of these. Like we need to put this in there. Even if it's a scale model, do you have a scale model? No, we have a real vehicle. It just comes to the real vehicle. You could, you know, I'm looking one for my museum that we're building. So maybe if you get some extras, we could put one in there. How about this? We didn't make a Lego model of the, we called the horror. We'll send you one, but you have to go on and stuff. This is really cool. That's going to be a project for you and Mills though. It's a Lego model. I know. Right? And then you can put it out and you'll be so proud. Models are cool. Something to do. Look at this thing. That's pretty sweet. We're we're we're shipping out to Lego models today. Nice. Keep it on. Keep it on. I have room. All right. Perfect. I'll appreciate you coming in. We'll have to have you back as we as this story develops. It's going to be one of the best interesting stories certainly of the next decade. Yeah. We'll be here. Thank you very much. Appreciate it. I'll thanks for coming in. If you own or lease trailers, you may have a

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21:58From one cab to a global network. Billions of mines. Trillions of data points. Everyone making your operation better. And we never build it alone. Sims are built with operators. Once a year, the entire freight industry stops what it's doing and comes to one place. Chattanooga, Tennessee. This is F3, the future of freight festival. It isn't just a conference.

23:02It's the largest festival in freight built to pull you all the way in. The energy, the ideas, the atmosphere, and the people who move this industry forward. Over 50 speakers, four events across three days. Founders, executives, innovators, and disruptors. All under one roof. All asking the same question. What comes next? On the main stage, the sharpest minds in freight take on the biggest questions in the business. The trends, the technology, and the forces shaping what's ahead. Then the clock starts. Seven minutes. No exceptions. The cutting edge of freight tech goes head to head live, battling for best in show. When the time's up, the lights go out. And in between, the conversations that don't happen anywhere else. The connections that change the trajectory of your business. The relationships you'll carry long after you leave. Because when the sessions end, the festival begins. Live entertainment. Unforgettable experiences. A celebration of the world of freight. And an energy you won't find at any other event in the industry. The leaders you need. The access you won't get anywhere else. This is where knowledge is

24:07shared. Where deals get done. Where the future of freight gets decided. F3. Future of freight festival. October 27th and 28th. The signal. Chattanooga, Tennessee. We'll see you there. Register now at live. freightwaves.com. We have the CEO of you ship to break it down for us. Sean Wu. Sean, what's going to freightways today? We know where you guys. We're doing great. We have been talking about automation in all forms. You guys said a really interesting intersection of marketplace, business that matches buyers and sellers. More so on the sort of consumer side than we typically deal with and trucking different types of equipment. We'd love to get in that. But we've been having this autonomous conversation with our prior guests, the CEO of Humble Robotics. I'd love to get your take on the autonomous story. What does the world look like once we get to autonomous trucking? Once we get there, I think it's already out there. It's 28 states. They already have

25:13trucks, half the states already have trucks that are out there moving freight testing. Those kind of things. We could kind of see a little bit of how it looks like when you take a look at waymos. It's lower accident rates. There's lower injury, raise lower claims. Those are the themes you could carry into for the trucking space. Well, not really talking necessarily about the safety issues and what the fact that these things can exist. I'm referring to the business of freight movement. It's a very small, tiny, tiny, tiny portion of freight is moved autonomous. We're talking a very small fraction around an era that if we eliminate it all autonomous, no one would notice the day. What I'm asking for you, if you could comment, on once we get to point to point autonomous across the market where it is a representative sample or a very large percent overall freight

26:18movement. What happens to the economy in terms of freight economy? Do we see consolidation? Do we see the intermediaries by assets? Any thoughts there? Man. I started being counter 15 years ago. Before, there was a big eight in the accounting firms. Right now, we have big four. I think consolidation is going to happen no matter what. There's a question of what are you going to do about the three, four million, however many truck drivers that are out there and what regulation will do to slow it down. But to your point, I think consolidation is going to happen. Whoever's in the top 10 logistics companies today, we're probably going to see a lot of that in the very high even public companies and definitely in the smaller mid market as well.

27:20Yeah, I think they would move faster in a post-mortem gallery world. I mean, with C.H. Robinson, Delupis thing is you want the safest form of transportation and the drivers themselves are the risk profile, both on safety issues, on-time service. Anyone who's been trucking knows, and this is, I'm going to get some hate message about this. But it's true, as a dispatcher, as a broker, you're only as good as the weakest length. And oftentimes, whether or not the truck driver does the job that they're, and look, drivers know this too. You get a bad truck driver, causes problems. With Autonomous, you at least have some assurability and predictability that you wouldn't have with a human driver. Craig, you are going to get a lot of hate mail for that. I'm used to it, man. That's for sure. For those that want to send me hate messages. Yeah, the public perception, I'd be curious to see what the general public perception is. If you look at the data, it would say a lot less accident rates. I don't have it in front of me

28:27right now. But there is an emotional feeling to that. If I'm a driver, and I'm a way to work, and I got, we're all my way to drop off. I got the kids in the back. And I see this huge, huge semi truck barreling through with no drivers in the front. It could be a, it could be a well thing to see. I think, I mean, like, I think the data is very clear that for the most part, you will have a lot of human errors that are in it. There are always going to be human errors. Anything that any of us do, right? And that doesn't mean... The distracted driving, you know, Julie, you and I interviewed someone a couple of weeks ago where distracted driving has taken over as a higher risk point than alcohol and drugs in terms of predicting... So on your phones, just on your phones. Yeah. And it's, like, I know how 10th and it is to be on a phone. I mean, it's a fact and human psychology is that you get... Or even just navigating all the screens on your dashboard now with these cars, right? That's tough as well. I know. Trying to figure out where stuff is

29:27and because they put, they try to compete. So, Sean, tell us a little bit about what your ship is up to these days. How are you guys thinking about the business and for the marketplace? Well, look, I got right into it. So, let's do for a 60-second intro on your ship for those that are not aware. Where are marketplace for shippers and carriers to move large and bulky items? Specializing a non-profile freight, household goods, heavy equipment, boats, antiques, and the likes. But you'll also find instant rates for cars and LTL. So a shipper can create a listing for their item, get bids from multiple different carriers or name a price, just get them moved. And a carrier can find loads, fill back halls, minimize dead miles on our marketplace. We don't do any parcels, just the large and bulky stuff. And so that's what your ship does. And it's kind of funny. We're talking about autonomous driving, automation in general.

30:30And then there's your ship and what we do and what we specialize in a non-profile standpoint. Your earlier question around what do businesses need to do to deal with this? We actually lean in a little bit into the non-autonomous side of things. As you can imagine, well, I'll tell you what, we just moved a three-ton hot tub about a month ago or so. There's no amount of standardization that's going to, there's not no volume for that. There's no amount of standardization that's going to get that thing on autonomous driving. There was multiple coordinated efforts, different parties coming together to try to get that done. And those are the kind of things that we take pride in in moving. You guys have always been the lead. I mean, you just have a TV show years ago. Are we going to bring that back? Oh my gosh, you know anybody in A&E or you got, you know some producer? I mean, look at you. I'm sure we could make the case for it. That was what, 20 years ago, Sean?

31:34I want to say, it was nine seasons, it was 10 seasons long or something like that. Shipping board, I guess it, 2012 to 2015, this says, shipping board on A&E. So it was only 10 minutes. My timeline just so messed up, but go ahead. Yeah, it was just like five years ago. Yeah, so I enjoyed watching it. It was a good show. So we've been talking to Sean about autonomy, but as you said, you know, you guys lean a little bit less into that being necessarily the best way to provide efficiencies. So what are other opportunities for improving freight efficiency that maybe you're less flashy or maybe you're less fun to talk about right now than autonomous vehicles, but what, what are you seeing otherwise? Well, if you're the non-profile, you know, division in any large logistics company, I think it's going to be ever more so important. Your job is to get the non-profile stuff out of your network, right?

32:36And you focus on winning on damage rates, on injury rates, when there's cross-stocking involved, claims, maximize your truck volume because that weird couch or antique desk is going to take up and have more of the amount of space in the truck. And so autonomy really works really, really well when things are standardized to the extreme. Highly repeatable, yeah. Highly, highly repeatable. And so if I were to just borrow that example, I just gave about the three-toned hot tub, that's not a very repeatable thing you want to prepare your network for, right? But maybe you took that because you're trying to make your client happy and, and you know, you're a household name, and you want to be able to offer a solution for that. So one of the things that I would imagine that non-profile department wants to do is like, just get that out of our network. How can we find someone a partner, someone else to help us move

33:38this thing, still focus on service, still focus on protection? You know, I think that's one of the things that companies can do to lean into standardization because that is happening. And autonomous driving AI is going to make that very, very attractive. So Sean, I want to talk a little bit about, you know, marketplaces are really, we've seen a lot of fraud happen in marketplaces, a lot of cargo theft. It's sort of become a big source of issues. We cover it frequently on the truckload side that load boards is where because it's an unknown party. You're dealing with, in many ways, a even longer tail of capacity than what, you know, a lot of the freight brokers are dealing with. How are you guys helping your clients deal with the security issues that are taking place in marketplaces? One benefit of being a 22 year old company is that we have a network of drivers that's built, that's spent years and years building that profile. The reviews that they've gathered,

34:44that is very important. We share that level of transparency with the shippers. You add that on top of our general marketplace trust and safety standards and procedures. You add that with the protection plans that we have offered on our platform. All that goes together is how we make sure that our marketplace is safe. It's protected and that shippers can find a lot of comfort while still getting the choices that they want. So one question I have and I had this person on my wife move from Manhattan to Dallas, Texas, years ago, this is 10 years ago. She actually used you ship and had her, her house goods held hostage by the driver refuse to deliver it, said, oh, I miscalculated the price. Now it's going to cost you. I think it was double. It's before I knew you, Sean. I couldn't call you. I'd be like, what the hell is up with this guy? But how do you, I mean, that I've heard this and this is a frequent scam, if you will,

35:47that takes place for moving household living goes where you have really, I wouldn't call it unsophisticated party, but this issue where this is not a business. This is a B2C transaction. Between two parties, how do you guys handle those situations where somebody's in household goods specifically, their movements are held hostage by, in this case, was a mover that had loaded all the freight into a truck and was then entered up, changing the terms. Yeah. Well, I can't comment on any specific cases, but what I hope your wife did was reach out to you, ship support, because that's what we're here for. A lot of times we'll go in and we'll mitigate the situation. As you can imagine, for household moves, for moving cars, if the things that you said you were looking to move or the car, you were looking to move turn out to be different,

36:49or there was stuff in the car. That could make it particularly difficult to adhere to the original price if terms have changed. You guys are investigating sort of like Airbnb would do in terms of the house. If I have a problem, is that the other thing coming? That's right. Yeah, that's right. And if we found that the carriers were at fault, we would step in and we would help out your wife, we would help out the shipper for anything that extra cost, or we're getting their stuff back. So I want to talk about the other major issue that's getting a lot of attention. Particularly in the freight broker intermediary issue, is the Montgomery, post Montgomery World, where freight brokers can now be held liable for their counter parties. It's obviously an issue when you're dealing with smaller vehicles that you don't know. How are you guys helping your customers really navigate and really vet these players around safety?

37:57We bring choice to front and center. We're a marketplace. The Montgomery case applies to us less so, because we don't select a carrier for you. We don't set the price for you. Most importantly, we give you a lot of options for you to choose from. We let you create your own listing so you can describe the things that you're looking to move. What about your customers? I'm not really thinking about your ship specifically, but the customers that are using the platform, where they're booking a transaction through the platform or at least matching to someone. How do you navigate that in a world of safety? From a shipper side or from the carrier side. From the shipper side, we keep a profile reviews on all transactions for our carriers. You can see this carrier has been in our own new ship since the shipping war days and has moved tons and tons of items similar to

39:01perhaps what you're looking to move. Here are their reviews that you can see. That's one of the primary ways that we help our shippers to navigate. Who's actually moving the things? You can see someone's been here for a long time. A lot of our drivers, their livelihood, they make their livelihood on your ship. Sean, is it easier? I'm just curious in a world of electric vehicles, we were talking earlier about internal combustion engines versus electric vehicles. I would imagine that moving in an EV is actually less hazardous than moving an internal combustion on a truck. Is that am I wrong about that? How do you guys think about it? Moving in EV versus moving it on a EV is a car that was electric. The car goes in EV as opposed to the truck. Again, we're in marketplace. What we do is we provide instant rates from carriers, from brokers

40:09directly to our shippers and allow them to choose. All of our carriers and brokers have their own formula for pricing EVs. You all you got to do is provide year-making model and you can probably find a half dozen quotes right there on our website. How would you describe the current market right now, Sean? Is the market really liquid? Is there a lot of activity if you see pullback in terms of movements? I mean, people aren't moving homes these days to the degree that they were. What do you guys experience in on the platform? Yeah, because of the move, everything large and bulky, I think cars has its own story, household moves as well. Those are the two that you've touched on. The secondary market for household goods, we're seeing that take up. We're seeing prices gone up quite a bit. That's probably not a surprise for anybody. You just take a look at the price of diesel and at the pump and you can kind of see that right away. That's carrying over to the

41:13cost of shipments. In cars, we are seeing some capacity constraints. We're hearing that from our carriers. We're hearing that from the brokers on the car side of things. From household goods, we're seeing a small revitalization of people selling the stuff around their house. People holding on to furniture a little bit more and bringing that with them wherever they go. And then in the household moves segment, we're not seeing as much volume as springtime. We'll see how this upcoming springtime is like. That's usually the super bowl of household moves. But with people not buying and selling as much, we're not seeing a lot of that demand there. Yeah, that's I think. We would all like to see the housing market come back. I think it would be good for everyone to see a more dynamic housing market. Sean, appreciate you coming on. Frit was today. All right. Well, thank you guys. Blind spots cost some of fleets, costliest collisions.

42:13Simpsara's AI gives you 360 degree visibility into risks on the road. So you can protect your drivers in real time. Learn more at simpsara.com. The world doesn't waste. So neither do they. Wheels on the interstate. Boots on the sides. Hands on the ship. We build for the world out here. And we build it with the people who live it. Ideas from the field made real by world class R&D. To keep the operation sharp, the front line's safe. And the world moving from one cab to a global network. Billions of miles. Trillions of data points. Everyone making your operation better. And we never build it alone.

43:16Simsara. Built with operators. Founders, executives, innovators and disruptors. All under one roof. All asking the same question. What comes next? On the main stage, the sharpest minds in freight take on the biggest questions in the business. The trends, the technology, and the forces shaping what's ahead. Then the clock starts. Seven minutes. No exceptions. The cutting edge of freight tech goes head to head, live, battling for best in show. When the time's up, the lights go out. And in between, the conversations that don't happen anywhere else. The connections that change the trajectory of your business.

44:20The relationships you'll carry long after you leave. Because when the sessions end, the festival begins. Live entertainment. Unforgettable experiences. A celebration of the world of freight. And an energy you won't find at any other event in the industry. The leaders you need. The access you won't get anywhere else. This is where knowledge is shared. Where deals get done. Where the future of freight gets decided. F3, future of freight festival. October 27th and 28th. The signal, Chattanooga, Tennessee. We'll see you there. Register now at live.fraithwaves.com. Why the spirit audience, many truck drivers listen to the show, watch the show. We have a lot of fleet executives. Let's talk about the state of autonomous trucks. Where are we at

45:22in terms of point to point? I think we're at a point where we've had a good momentum in the on the regulatory environment when it comes to the technology adoption. I would say we and others are at the starting point of that inflection point where we're starting to see live operations on public roads. We're in the initial part of that. So there's the deployment of autonomous technology into real life settings is extremely complex and a lot of aspects to take into consideration. So I think it's where to start that gradual journey and step by step approach. So you have gone public. This was your first earnings call. What should we draw from this? I don't know. Is it an early stage company? People are betting really on the long-term vision, the opportunity here. How do you feel about this quarter?

46:24Well, I think we came in. We're in public on the 10th of June of this year. We have a really good first half here that we reported on last week. Really executing on the strategy that we set as we were going to go in public. I continue to execute on converting the $800 million or so of joint business plans that we set together with our customers into actual revenue hitting the books and continue developing on our autonomous technology and the development. So it's been a lot focused on executing towards that. So we had a 27% increase in our revenues. We expect that growth rate to above double for the next half year of this year. We increased our autonomous driverless hours with about 60%. So really executing towards that plan that we set very much focused on that gradual, continued scaling together with our 30 plus customers that were across seven countries.

47:28Yeah, I mean, some interesting announcements, Amazon's, middle mile network, 75 electric heavy duty trucks across five locations. You guys announced that in April, 2026 before you were a public company. Tesla, announcement with Tesla at 500 semi-trucks across your platform. Tell us a little bit about those announcements. Interesting that Tesla is partnering. They're not known for that. Any context there? Well, yeah. So I think, you know, if we start with the Amazon announcement that we did earlier this, that was on the back of having gone through sort of a approving period together with them and proving our technology and working together to get with them. And then we took that next step in the relationship of an initial deployment of those 75 trucks in the middle mile network. We've started executing on that. We expect the majority of that 75 trucks to be deployed before year end. And part of that is also, of course, the order that we put

48:31in and the partnership with Tesla in order to have a good supply of vehicles that we can deploy on the platform. Tesla once again, also relationship we've had for a while. And as the Tesla deliveries are firming up, we decided to do a logic commitment to that and to deploy that on our platform. The initial is about 500 trucks we're expecting 75 approximately that to be deployed this side of the year and targeting to have the rest deployed by end of next year. And this is US, US focused. So I'm familiar with your form factor, what we've seen and photos of your picture of your equipment. But I'm the Tesla, are they licensing the hardware and software? Like what is what exactly is this partnership that you have with Tesla? So we're requiring the Tesla semi-sale.

49:35So in our freight capacity as a service model that we deploy transport capacity and we acquire the trucks we finance them through third party financing partners. And then we deploy them on our platform and execute on the freight for our customers. So in this case, we will purchase the vehicles, we will have third party financiers that the finance item will deploy that on our SAGAI platform and do all the planning and execution of those trucks on the platform. Are you guys actually soliciting freight or is this a, I mean, are you actually the carrier of record for these particular shipments? So we are, yes, we're executing on the, we're executing on the shipments exactly. And we're using our SAGAI platform and in this case the Tesla trucks. So you guys would actually be the carrier of record for these particular shipments. Now, does it, Roosevelt, do you think that's the future of your business model is really becoming an autonomous motor carrier? Is that really the

50:35way to think of it? So I think the way to think about it is, you know, we've set up our entire uh, a strategy in business around the around the idea that, you know, by having our, our platform that sits in the middle of the SAGAI platform that's essentially, you know, ingest the transportation data plans out the transportation sets the execution plan. And currently we are also executing on that, on that plan. In many cases, we have carrier partners that are executing on the, on that, on that transportation. And by doing that and building those customer relationships and, and that transportation data and, and vehicle data that you accumulate over time on the, on the platform, and then gradually increasing the level of automation. So essentially deploying more and more autonomous into into the freight networks of our, of our customers, because we believe that, you know, the adoption of autonomous technology, first of all requires more than just the autonomous technology itself, which is a crucial part of it. But it's also about the operational understanding and, and the way in which those vehicles are being deployed into real life

51:38operation. But also that, you know, it's, it's going to be a gradual process and, and, and, and starting with, with certain types of applications, expanding the, the capabilities of, of the, autonomous technology, the regulatory framework, uh, being built out and then gradually growing more and more autonomous into the networks of our, uh, customers. And by accumulating this transfer of demand on the platform, we're well positioned to do that and decide where and when, in which case it makes sense to use it. So, the platform allows you to execute the planning and operation of these trucks, because it is very different than planning a regular truck, right? There's not hours of service. If there's not a driver, uh, charging times are different ranges are different, miles per day, I assume would be different. So this platform allows, eventually via automation for all of those operational things to happen specific to these electric and autonomous trucks. Correct. And we're doing that already today, you know, with the 250 or so trucks we have deployed on

52:42our, on our platform as a today, it is the platform that allows us to plan and execute on the transport in such a way so that we can deploy electric trucks on the platform and be, you know, cost efficient to do so in a cost efficient way, taking into account some of the factors that you, that you, uh, mentioned, for example, charging energy cost, uh, optimization of the, of, of the routes, the utilization of the, of the vehicles, etc. And that logic then also transfers to, so we deploy the autonomous trucks on our platform, uh, are, are planning a similar way, uh, the manager of trucks on the platform are, are, are, uh, are planned on the platform as well. And then as you said, there are differences in the logic when there's a driver not in the vehicle, but, but the overall sort of, uh, uh, building of that freight network happens on the, on the platform. So I, I am curious, uh, you guys have been, you know, pretty much been around since 2017. We've been covering stories of autonomous trucking, start-ups, companies have come and gone. Some of them

53:43have been infamous. Too simple. It comes to mind as the most infamous of those. Some have been just, you know, poor timing, poor business model, lack of capital, lots of reasons. We're down to, I think five companies of scale, uh, that are still around that are, are sort of still operating, uh, uh, uh, uh, there's a lot of start-up and call, I'd like to say dreamers and schemers out there. You guys have been around for, you know, I, uh, company was born on and around that time. What, what year did you guys start? Uh, it's, it's a 10 year anniversary actually this year. So, same, I was thinking, yeah. You're, you're at the same time as we got started. Uh, the, what is enabled you to survive? I mean, there's been a, it was a washout. I think at one point, there were 24 companies that we tracked that were had raised at least, uh, enough money to, to, to, you know, talking tens to hundreds of millions of dollars. You guys had been around and, and made it to the other side, if you will. What, what, what is enabled you to do that?

54:43Well, I think it, it goes back to, you know, the, the, uh, uh, the, the overall strategy of, of the company in, in the sense of, you know, we're, with an early commercialization model, right? We're choosing to rather than, then, you know, uh, uh, making ourselves completely dependent on the exact timing of when, when and where autonomous is gonna, is, is, is going to happen. Because, as you said, that is a, you know, it's, it's a process that's been ongoing for, for a long while. We've chosen to build the business around an early commercialization with the customers, which also means that you have revenue generation. You have the commercial opportunity is locked in with the, uh, with the customers. And then gradually you, you execute towards, uh, towards that, which means that we've been able to build a, a business across seven, seven countries with 30 plus, 30 plus customers, uh, you know, the likes of Amazon and Heineken and, and PepsiCo, etc. And, and, and, and generate revenues and actually prove out our sort of, uh, product, uh, gradually.

55:44And also then, you know, make yourself less dependent on the exact timing of, of, of, uh, when broad, when autonomous deployments happens broadly. And, and tailored for this idea that this is a technology-opt adoption that is, is going to happen gradually and it's going to happen step by step and it needs to happen in that way because of the complexity and the, uh, and regulatory environment. So I think that, that concept has resonated well with investors and, and, and, it has also allowed us to, to, you know, to, uh, uh, get through all of the ups and downs that have been in the, in, in industry. So what I asked a little bit about your recently launched, um, defense business unit. Can you talk to us a little bit about what you're doing there? Yeah, absolutely. So I think the, you know, the, the, the, the, the, the, the concept behind that, I think, about that is, you know, we've built what we call the Android driver, right, which is our, our, our autonomous tactic in that we have historically put into our, uh, self-developed autonomous vehicles and we've deployed them on, on public and private roads with, with, with customers.

56:49Um, we about 12 months ago, we launched, we called the vehicle Ignosis Software Stack, essentially allowing us to take that stack and apply it into different sets of hardware, hardware, hardware platforms, bid and civilian or, or, or, or, or defense applications. And, and, and, uh, we, we started the, on the, on the, on the fence side with, with a, a pilot for, a, for an Aero Island country, where we took our autonomous stack and applied it into a different set of, of, of equal, not a heavy-duty truck, uh, within part of the Swedish resilience initiative where we're doing the same, we're co-developing a vehicle platform with our autonomous technology, technology in there. And, and out of that came, you know, the, the, the, the, the sort of, defense applications of, of, of the Android driver. And essentially, the core purpose of that is, you know, remove, uh, humans from, uh, from, from, from danger in, especially in, in, in, sort of, you know, transportation happening from four-row-based to, to, to, uh, to front lights,

57:49for example, where you have a lot of repetitive transportation happening. It is a, a, a, a, a, a dangerous, uh, sort of area to be. And then by adopting a autonomous technology into those vehicle platforms, we're able to help take, uh, humans out of, out of, out of homes way. And since then, we've continued broadening that we brought on, uh, Genokey Talisander joined our board, uh, a few months ago, uh, we've continued, you know, our efforts in, in, uh, in specifically in the US, sorry, in, in Europe, but also, uh, looking into applications in the US, we've tied partnerships, with, with, with, as an example, and we're continuing to build that, that, that, that business. It is at the early stages now, but I think that it's a business double that will, uh, fight a lot of growth for us over the next few years. So, Ruzbo, it's interesting watching some of the videos. China, obviously, has got a lot of really interesting. I mean, there, there, in many ways, it's advancing a lot of the autonomous stuff really fast. For, uh, I mean, they have a, got a friendlier, uh, regulatory environment, uh, for certain technologies. That's the

58:52great thing about the Chinese model is they want to do something they can and they will, uh, unlike, you know, we, western democracies, which tend to be a little bit, uh, more, we're stifled there. But I am curious, you know, I look at, uh, you, you've done this announcement with Daph. I mean, huge fan of Scania trucks. I just think they go so much harder. There's so much better looking to the America, uh, uh, conventionals. But I see these things at a China that look freaking weird. And it's like, like, do you have, in the ultimate, and you got the Ein ride thing, which, honestly, looks a little weird too. Do you have sort of American trucker? It looks weird. I'll say that. No, no, it's, it's, uh, but I, I mean, what does the form factor look like? And I know that doesn't matter you, but it, you know, someone who loves looking at truck. It was a student of the history. Do you have a preferred form factor that you think we'll see with autonomous trucks? Well, I think we're going to see a, a plethora of, of, of, you know, form factors come up. We

59:54started off with the, with the rigid version that you see here on the, the little, uh, miniature version of it behind, behind me, um, which is a smaller, a smaller torque, a rigid, rigid version. Um, the next, you know, we're, we'll be launching additional generations of that with, with slightly different form factors. I think the, you know, the, the moving over time into a tractor trailer setup also, you know, thinking about a few, as you expand the use cases from, from, you know, the industrial type of, of, of those that we're doing today into point to point or, or longer distances and higher speeds and matching into port operations, for example, and others. I think, you know, we'll expand those, those, uh, form factors, uh, as well. And that is also partly, you know, the, the reason for, for, uh, both being, you know, a vehicle, a gnostic in that, in, in that sense, but also the partnership that we, we announced with that, for example, who give us access to a different form of form factor. And, and they will make sense in different, different,

1:00:56different settings. Yeah, if you're seeing Wolverine, if you're seeing the movie, Wolverine, I think so. And it's the autonomous trucks. I mean, Elizabeth, I want me to talk about this, or necessarily agree with me. The, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, super hero movie, uh, but they're like trailers, like chassis that have boxes around them. And I think they get hijacked or something. I don't know, maybe I just remember watching them. Yeah, there's the, yeah. But I think, I think the point is, you know, um, uh, at, at, you know, the reason also, what we started off with, with, with, with the, the form factor that we did, uh, was the number of reasons. I wanted to build an autonomous vehicle platform that was built from day one for autonomous, which means built for, you know, driverless driving. So you don't need the cab in, in the vehicle. Also, as we have demonstrating, this is how we see, you know, the, the, the, the future of autonomous transportation, uh, uh, transportation looking. But if you, you know, it also gives you additional space. It gives you more flexibility in terms of how you

1:01:56build up the form factors. But I think we're, you know, over the next five, ten, next number of years, we're going to see different form factors, uh, and, and, and different making sense in different types of operational, uh, operational setups. You're going to see that from us, you're going to see that from, from, from others as well. I think my prediction is it ends up more like the port of Rotterdam where you have these containerization, these sort of weird chassies that move around and sort of looks more like that. I mean, you're closer to it. I do, I do have one really important question. If you had to pick a form factor between the, the cab overs, the scania trucks, the daft trucks that are in Europe or the American Conventional, which would you own if you were, uh, if you could own one of those? You can't pick a, you know, pick between the, I know, no, no, I actually, I mean, being having grown up what, you know, on the Transformers, you know, I'm going to have to go with the Optimus Prime, right? So I'm going to have to go with the US, uh, the US, but, but, but, you know, there's from, from that perspective, right? For my, for the sake of my

1:03:00childhood, uh, you know, my, my 10 year old self, I, it's probably that way I have to go. I don't know, man, the, the king and queen of the Sweden may contact you. They may be disappointed. You pick, I'm, I'm going to myself into trouble right now, but you're, you're, you're, this has been recorded. I personally think the scania trucks are the coolest trucks on the road. Really? Oh, yeah, I just think that Europeans, maybe it's because it's, it's like, it's foreign to us. It's foreign to us. I just think they go so much harder. I think that's probably, I wonder RV made out of that. So maybe can be autonomous too. Ruseb, I appreciate you coming and joining us. What do you mean? In today's freight environment, every second of uptime matters. Of course, maintenance is inevitable, but large fleets cannot succeed on reactive fixes alone. That's why I love truck care, delivers smarter, preventative maintenance. Loves understands that operational pressures demand a nationwide service network for better visibility, actionable intelligence, and consistent execution, all of which you protect your assets, reduce your total cost of ownership and maximize your uptime. Maintenance is of course inevitable, but large fleets cannot

1:04:02succeed on reactive fixes alone. That's why love, truck care, delivers smarter, preventative maintenance, learn more. The world doesn't wait. So neither do they. Wheels on the interstate. Boots, on the sites, hands, on the ship. We build for the world out here, and we build it with the people who

1:05:06live it. Ideas from the field made real by world-class R&D. To keep the operation sharp, the front line safe, and the world moving from one cab to a global network, billions of miles. Trillions of data points. Every one, making your operation better. And we never build it alone. Sam Zara, Built With Operators. Once a year, the entire freight industry stops what it's doing and comes to one place, Chattanooga Tennessee. This is F3, the future of freight festival. It isn't just a conference. It's the largest festival in freight built to pull you all the way in. The energy, the ideas, the atmosphere, and the people who move this industry forward. Over 50 speakers, four events across three days, founders, executives, innovators, and disruptors, all under one roof, all asking the

1:06:13same question. What comes next? On the main stage, the sharpest minds in freight take on the biggest questions in the business. The trends, the technology, and the forces shaping what's ahead. Then the clock starts. Seven minutes. No exceptions. The cutting edge of freight tech goes head-to-head, live, battling for best-in-show. When the time's up, the lights go out. And in between, the conversations that don't happen anywhere else. The connections that change the trajectory of your business. The relationships you'll carry long after you leave. Because when the sessions end, the festival begins. Live entertainment. Unforgettable experiences. A celebration of the world of freight. And an energy you won't find at any other event in the industry. The leaders you need. The access you won't get anywhere else. This is where knowledge is shared. Where deals get done. Where the future of freight gets decided. F3. Future of freight festival. October 27th and 28th. The signal, Chattanooga Tennessee. We'll see you there. Register now at live.fraitwaves.com.

1:07:15We're going to move on to AI. Another major conversation that's getting a lot of it. Attention right now. We have Valentina Jordan. She has the CEO and co-founder of NADA. Of Valentina, welcome to freightways today. Excited to be here. How are you? We're doing great. Let's talk a little bit about AI and supply chain. It's obviously a very important conversation. But you've built an AI native operating system for global trade. What does that mean exactly? Yeah, so it's actually operational brain. I'm not out. We've always believed that global trade is a mixture of three things. Movement of goods, data and money. I know those three need to work in Eonsan for actually things to happen. So in very practical terms, what this means is that we combine structured and unstructured data and create context, knowledge, and experience in which companies run and to have agents work and do their day-to-day tasks. So our belief is that without the data

1:08:17foundation, it's impossible for AI to actually work and bring ROI. So AI agents, big piece of your sort of go-to-market, a big piece of your business model. This is a, I wouldn't say a crowded space because the opportunity is just so massive, but certainly there's a number of companies that are doing that trying to deploy this in supply chain. Why is not a different? Honestly, for us, it's not about the agents. I'm going to be brutally honest. We think that agents are going to be commoditized. I'm not going to say weeks, but probably months. The real challenge here is the data underneath those agents, and especially in supply chain and global trade, that data needs to be all about the context, knowledge, and experience that operators have built over decades. So we're all about that AI-native data infrastructure, which we call the operational brain. And the agents are the tip of the iceberg. They're the cherry on the cake, which transition us from this visibility and recommendation tools that we've been used for decades

1:09:22into true action and output. So walk us through how is your model trained with this level operational expertise and this clean data? How is it collected? How does it learn? And then how does it live and breathe and grow? Beautiful. So, Luke, our earth implementation is super simple. We connect with the existing tech stack, which is super fragmented, super dispersed. So ERP, TMS, WMS, OMS, the hundreds of thousands of dollars that companies are already paying for their existing tech stack, plus email teams and all the unstructured information, spreadsheets, where operators are doing 80 to 90 percent of their work. That's fed through context engineering. So it's basically learning every time a signal comes in, a contract comes in, an email comes in, and it's capturing and creating nodes of how the company operates. So I'll give you a very tactical example. If every Tuesday you're receiving a arrival notices from your container, from a specific freight forwarder, we already know that the brain already starts to learn that you'll

1:10:26be receiving this every Tuesday, and it's telling the agent what to do. So it's combining pattern, signals, context, knowledge, and experience into how every company works. Because if we know something for sure in global trade, is that no company is the same. So there's no out-of-the-box solution here that would work. So Valentina, you guys just raised around. It feels like the United Nations, the BMW iVentures, Bosch Ventures, Hitachi Ventures, and Yamaha Motor Ventures, again, all global companies. What were they investing in? How much, first of all, how much did you raise? And then what is the goal of the capital? Yeah, Luke, so this is a very strategic ground for us, because as you said, these are companies, leaders, and industrial automotive with global footprints. And what they're investing on is the bet that the data underneath data infrastructure is what's missing in this global conglomerates to actually put AI to work. We'll know that companies have,

1:11:30and you mentioned it before, clean data, but data is not really fragmented and messy. So without building this foundation, it's very difficult for this global company footprints to actually see real value in implementing these new technologies. So that's why these roundings extremely strategic for us. The capital is, is, is for a global expansion. As the word says, this global trade, so is not a global. We're operating in over eight countries and with 8,000 suppliers, 60, 60 countries of impact through our clients. So our footprint is global, and having this partners, this backer is super strategic for us in that sense. So it's both a validation that the thesis beyond just agents is the right path, and then second for our global expansion. So you've got big automotive suppliers and big automotive companies, but when I look at your customer list, it looks like a lot of health and beauty. You've got new balance, Lori Al, Moette and Shendong. I didn't say that right. I don't know, but it's like literally my favorite.

1:12:35I don't know. I always get that wrong. That sounds that's right. Maybe you'll be Valentina. Anyways, you've got a lot of like beauty category customers, luxury beauty, yeah, consumer brand and apparel. Luxury is a good point. But automotive is just, this is hardcore manufacturing. What exactly, what attracted the automotive suppliers to your as an investment? Luke, so yeah, we work with the biggest distributors of these brands, as you just mentioned, and we naturally, because of our backgrounds, a micro founder, we started with food and retail, distribution, wholesaling, traders. And what we quickly realized is that the data problem and the data challenge lies the same across all of the industry. So expanding to manufacturing just became very natural. There is a lot of physical paperwork still going on on the physical plans. And so getting all of this context knowledge and experience, centralizing all of their systems,

1:13:36fighting fragmentation, getting away from this tribal knowledge that affect IPs of companies is exactly what they're betting on. So there's definitely a special sauce coming in automotive. But I would highly say that this is agnostic. And what we're solving for is giving the intelligence superpower and intelligence for companies around the world to be able to gather their data and successfully implement AI. You know, Julie, I was thinking about we've interviewed now 200 people, about half of them CEOs and founders. The interesting thing is, as we interview female women founders, oftentimes their first customers tend to be health and beauty. They focus on that and barrel. We've done this whereas a lot of the male founders are focused on other parts of the study industrial supply chain. Is there something to do that Valentina in terms of the first customers you guys went after to solve which problems? Look, I'm going to be super honest. I'm surrounded in a very masculine industry. We started with your pure logistics, you know, operators that are firefighting 24-7

1:14:42that every time we get on our call, how's your day being? How's your week? You know, they're like, oh gosh, if I begin to tell you. So definitely, I mean, I love that you're recognizing that pattern. That wasn't the case for us. The real case for us is that one of her first use cases was around field rate. So we found a beautiful niche around helping companies and sure that they were not having stockouts and over stock. And that was one of the first things that we did with NARA. We heavily helped them in increasing cash to cash cycles, reducing perishables. So there is a pattern around how do you make sure that your inventory is healthy? And that's why you're seeing that tendency in our clients. Not necessarily because of beauty, though, I like that. No, I just thought it was just an interesting observation. Again, it may not be scientific, but it strikes me that people tend to build on things they understand and things that they care about. As founders, we have to go solve this. This is hard work, isn't it? Like building a business is like

1:15:44super grinding work. You got to love the thing that you're doing. Totally. I don't know that I care about the people's trade. What's that? Go ahead. But especially in global trade, I mean, directly and directly, we all care because we want to see shelves. If full, we want to make sure that the operations are actually working. And I think that the beauty is that in global trade is that no day is the same. Every company is different. Nothing is an exception because anything can happen. And I think this is precisely the magic of the current era that we're seeing. And what these round means for us is you're seeing big global companies that have been around for a very long time seeing that if they do not fix their data infrastructure, AIs can be very hard to implement. So you mentioned stockouts and document handling and all that. And so can you walk us through what your tool or if it's a specific agent

1:16:46within your platform? How it actually matches those shipping documents and prevents detention and emerge stockouts? How does it actually work? Yeah. So think of NARA as a membrane on top of your existing tech stack, ERP, TMS, WMS, OMS, plus email. Our brain is contextualizing this information constantly keeping it up to date, mapping signals, understanding what's going on in a macro economic level. Are there weather incidents? Did someone tweet something and it ended up changing the oil prices? Is this stretch of removes clothes? So it's capturing all of the signals. There was an earthquake recently in Colombia, which is affecting local ports. So it captures all of the industry knowledge. Second, it starts to map all of the SOPs and learnings from your internal company. How does your payment terms work? Are there any special treats to certain suppliers or clients? Are there any patterns? Are you paying? Do you have any early payment units against discount? So it's capturing all these signals in an industry, in a company, and in a

1:17:50user level. So what's important for you? Are you monitoring your specific lane? Are you monitoring a specific product? So this is the brain always learning. And on top of that, we have a suite of agents that act on that data for specific use cases. So you mentioned a couple of them, three, four way matching to be able to do all the reconciliation and accounts payables. On average, we're identifying for clients between 300,000 to 500,000 dollars caught at invoicing differently proactively. Everything around OS and D, over shortage and damage. So all of the claim building freight audit is a huge one for us, being able to map all of those costs for our clients. So depending on where the biggest needs in the business are, we deploy the agent always with an output in mind. So we always are working with our clients to understand, what are your real business needs? Is it more on increasing sales? Is it protecting your margins or is it

1:18:51reducing costs? And then we start to go down to what are the business and operational opportunities that will move those numbers. And that's where you put the agent. So we do not start agent first. We start data first, output first, and then comes the agent. How does that brain build that context? So you mentioned whether events or other things, you know, on the industry level that create the context that then can speak to anomalies in the data. Where does that context come from? So again, it's three layers. The industry is from it's connected to public data sources, private data sources, and it's constantly being updated and reading all this information, interpreting signals. In the company level, it's coming from your contracts, from your share points, from your ERP, from the emails that are going back and forth, again, capturing that data and those signals. And then from the user level, how are you interacting with the agents? What are automations? Are you building yourselves? What reports are you generating? And that learns, again,

1:19:56on a user or on a persona level, what is it that it's going? So we're basically capturing all of the interactions that are going on on an industry company and user level, and that's how the brain is learning. This is all context engineering. And again, it's for us, it's just the secret sauce for agents to actually work because we work with a lot of food distributors. And I can tell you, there's more similarities between a food distributor and a, I know, furniture or a chemical business than there is between two food distributors because every company operates differently. And that's what makes agents unique, powered by the brain. Valentina, as you sort of think about this business, how much of this, in terms of your background, your upbringing was driven by, it is a big problem and want to solve. What exactly was this sort of inspiration for you? Yeah, so being really honest, I come from the tech row that I've been building

1:20:58for 13 years, but I think you don't serve buildings until you've been supplied chain because there's no happy path, anything can happen. The whole credit comes to my co-founder, Lafa. He's a, their generation, his family's immigrating to Puerto Rico, and he worked in his family business, which was 120, three-year-old business in the food distribution. So felt the pain firsthand, tried to look for a solution out there, and it wasn't convinced with that a visibility platform was actually what was going to solve this underlying data problem, and that's what we started to build. So we're a perfect mixture between tech background and operations. I worked at Amazon, I worked at Lafayette last mile delivery company. So I have been in Lafayette last mile delivery for a while, Lafayette last mile delivery tech, but it was really having operators inside the organization what allowed us to differentiate from everything that is out there and understand that, unless the data foundations is there, it's extremely hard for AI to actually generate impact

1:22:02and for operators to trust it. Yeah, it's a great point. Well, appreciate you coming on, sharing the news with us. Congratulations, and best of luck as you guys build out your business. Hope to have you back as you guys, as you can make those investments and achieve results. Yeah, appreciate you both. Have a great day, and thank you for having me. Every load you move depends on one thing, knowing who's on the other side, and highway gives freight brokers the carrier identity tools to verify carriers secure the load, and book with confidence that performance guarantee puts up $100,000 behind that promise. Real money behind the standard. No other freight technology company has made that commitment. This is again highway, the standard for carrier identity. The world doesn't wait, so neither do they. Wheels on the interstate, boots on the sides, hands on the ship. We build for the world out here, and we build it with the people who live it.

1:23:07Ideas from the field made real by world-class R&D. To keep the operation sharp, the front line safe, and the world moving. From one cab to a global network, billions of miles, trillions of data points, everyone making your operation better, and we never build it alone. Thames are built with operators.

1:24:07Founders, executives, innovators, and disruptors. All under one roof. All asking the same question. What comes next? On the main stage, the sharpest minds in freight take on the biggest questions in the business. The trends, the technology, and the forces shaping what's ahead. Then the clock starts. Seven minutes. No exceptions. The cutting edge of freight tech goes head-to-head, live, battling for best-in-show. When the time's up, the lights go out. And in between, the conversations that don't happen anywhere else. The connections that change the trajectory of your business. The relationships you'll carry long after you leave. Because when the sessions end, the festival begins. Live entertainment. Unforgettable experiences. A celebration of the world of freight. And an energy you won't find at any other event in the industry. The leaders you need. The access you won't get anywhere else. This is where knowledge is shared. Where deals get done. Where the future of freight gets decided. F3. Future of freight festival. October 27th and 28th. The signal. Chad and Nougat Tennessee.

1:25:09We'll see you there. Register now at live.fratewaves.com. We have the Chief Commercial Officer of Avaride. Avaride is all about autonomous vehicles and delivery robots. We have the Chief Commercial Officer. How do you know, Sir Jay? Hey, hi. Doing good. Thank you very much. Well, tell us a little bit about what's going on with you guys. Where are we at in your autonomous vehicle implementation? Well, we actually currently operating to large areas. One is the Austin area, mostly with our R&D rights. We have probably about 150 to 200 vehicles running here. Or basically the sole purpose is advancing the technology. And we are deployed in Dallas on Uber platform. Where we have over 60 cars basically making rights with passengers on the databases.

1:26:09So this is all passenger cars, not trucks? These are passenger cars, but we actually have several hundreds of small trucks doing actually deliveries, which are like we call them rovers, like robots. As a like suitcase size autonomous, fully autonomous vehicles. And we already have several hundreds of them. And we're progressing very fast. We work on Uber and the Grop hub platforms in Jersey, City, Fili, Austin, Dallas, Miami. And we're present at over 25 college campuses with these modes. Okay. So it is delivery robots. So delivering food, whatever you order via UberEats or Uber delivery. It's not UberEats anywhere, I guess. Right? It's called something else because they deliver way more than just food.

1:27:13But yes. I mean, I do not know that still. Is it called UberEats? We're going to invade this until we know. I think it is still UberEats. But we don't work with just what UberEats will also work with the Grop hub in the college campuses and in the cities. And we also had a number of pilots with the grocery delivery. So we actually deliver multiple types of products or basically providing a supply for logistics layer. So our goal not to build a particular car or a robot. Our goal is to basically build a driver which can be applied to basically any type of chassis. And they'll can be used for different type of services. Yeah. And then there's also the driverless cars via actually Uber passenger vehicles. Correct? Yeah, that's correct. So I imagine that the driver,

1:28:15though, and you're talking about being able to be used in multiple applications, which we've talked about with some other autonomous companies as well, and how cool that context is in being able to change it. But I imagine operating on sidewalks versus operating on the road is pretty different. Are they trained very differently? Well, the core of the technology is basically the same. Then we're definitely making certain adjustments. We collect additional datasets that specific to the sidewalk operations. But having the core, which was originally designed to manage such a complicated task as managing a vehicle at the roads, basically make our robots probably the most advanced robots in the market. But definitely, yeah, there is certain customization for the particular use case and for the size and for the type of the type of the choices was the multiple chains that were made in the

1:29:20cortex to make it happen. So, Sergei, I have seen these around college campuses. My son, Baylor University, we were doing whores. We see these rovers. I'm just curious, what is the most unusual thing that you've seen around college campuses in terms of is it late nights like what these things you imagine college kids just messing with the robot? No, I mean, actually, I'm curious about the activity. Are these late-night pizza runs? They get the munchies after a night out. What's the types of things that you guys see? Yeah, the midnight hunger is something special. Especially during the end of the semester when the kids are getting ready for exams and stuff like that. We actually extended service hours across the college campuses during last year and they added substantial amount of orders to our daily deliveries.

1:30:22Yeah, of course, there's the all kind of jokes around robots. So, sometimes kids like to have fun and try to put the robots into a tricky situation. You can find tons of funny videos on TikTok and other platforms. So, I think we saw one that was, again, I think it was AI, at least people say that it rolled off the back of a into a peer into the ocean. I don't know, you probably saw this one a couple of days ago. Yeah, I think I understand. Yeah, I think that was pure. That's 99% that was an AI. I doubt that can actually happen with any of the players who is seriously present in the market, just because all this tech is like map based. We definitely define the areas where robots shouldn't be going and it will anyway detect the end of the peer end of the road, even if that was allowed to go there. There were some great teams about it end in its life, rough rides, all sorts of

1:31:27sort of jokes. Unfortunately, your expense in some ways. But, Sergei, I would like to get into some specifics because Julie brings up something that I, in terms of the controversy around autonomous vehicles we've seen as you talk about college kids doing things, but also there's a level of anger in autonomous, just overall concern, fear, just these are polarizing conversations, particularly in our community because we have a lot of professional truck drivers. What is it you see that can protect the actual equipment from vandalism? Well, I think first of all consumers like public should get used to that. We see, we definitely usually see the spike on any, let's say, I would say, unnormal activity when we just launch an in-new place, then it goes down over the time, usually after one year of operation in one place, people just get used to that, people start and understand all the benefits of having those because actually specifically talking about robots,

1:32:30even I think it also applies with the rides too because autonomous cars and autonomous delivery robots, they basically start from the tasks that usually couriers, I can't say hate or definitely try to avoid because we are automating the routine and the routine, like the short ride, short distance in tough places where there is no place to park, to drop off the order, like short repetitive rides in a city downtown in a dense environment. So I think as the industry matures, the negative side will be significantly reduced in terms of perception. We also do a lot of activities in terms of community engagement and like working with the communities to explain all the benefits and to explain the safety for our products and it also gives us a good result.

1:33:33So we definitely see some improvements here compared to the early days of autonomous vehicle deployments. I'm looking at the question where we have had quarters here and I remember the time when we were about to make like a first steps but the number of operators already been present in the city and I remember absolutely wild things that have been happening. We can't see that anymore while the number of autonomous vehicles like dramatically increased in the town. So I think it is just the matter of like a maturity of the deployment and maturity of the just perception. Yeah I can see that. I also I love how wholesome you made the late night food deliveries on college campuses when they're towards the end of the semester when they're staying up. We knew that's versus my life. I have a night tenure all night. I'm the one who's the lightest. I'm the lightest. That Ian's pizza or Qtaba at Barclays on my way home. We also only had delivery options of

1:34:37like pizza or Jimmy John's and they would bike. Exactly what you just mentioned. There was not parking on the campus that I went to too. So this makes so much sense. I have kind of an also all question and I want to ask about how you guys designed what these delivery robots look like because I think they're kind of cute honestly and was that intentional like or was it solely functional specific? It's a very good question. It's a very good question. Yeah kind of we don't we have no ambition to build the car because the cars exist but we had to actually develop the robot and it design as actually predefined by a number of things. First of all the compartment actually designed to fit like a standard large pizza. Basically it holds the 16-inch

1:35:37pizza box plus some insulation on the side plus it has some space to put some beverage like drinks aside so we don't we don't have to put it on top of like a pizza box so your pizza isn't spoiled. But from the outside appearance specifically we found this very like a useful this animated face actually adds the cuteness and some sort of personality to the device and we we actually noticed that actually dramatic decrease of vandalism when we introduced that because the people start associating that with like a kind of a life creature with some personality so they are not less in position to you know go Harris. We have a place in town a Japanese restaurant that has they swear my kids like to go to 90% just because a robot delivers

1:36:40to your delivery to your cell by the mall it's like you know what Japanese steakhouse. And we're gonna talk about this I need to learn about it. It's cute and that's why they like it and it has cat ears and it has a face similar to this and that's like what they get excited about and I think that it does and it's like a connection versus it can speak yeah so all those like a human accents they add personality and they're actually reduce the risk of it's being vandalized. Sir Jay what is the biggest sort of you know the timeline is a big question I think for a lot of people you know the delivery robots make sense on a college campus they make sense in urban environments I mean New York cities but you could get it almost anything delivered for the city for decades because that that is with high concentrations of people it's very easy to do that I live out in the country Julie lives in the suburbs we care more about when are we

1:37:43gonna be able to get autonomous delivery stuff to our houses in the suburbs and I know this is happening in certain cities but it's not ubiquitous what what is the timeline from your perspective. Well I totally agree the efficient range that robot can service is actually quite small it's a very good fit for college campuses and dense city environment but definitely for to service the larger areas and more customers we need a solution that can cover a longer range and basically this solution is called autonomous car robot taxes and nothing on the application that car can support robot taxes sounds very natural because it's actually technically a little more I would say it's a little easier to deploy like a taxes from just partnership perspective because basically you have a right-hailing platform you have a

1:38:47taxi operator and then you have like the final customers in delivery space you also have a like a merchant or the other partner that basically has to load the robot and you have to basically unload the order at the drop-off point so that the little bit more complicated from the operational standpoint but we see great potential with delivery by autonomous vehicles so answering to the question when some of the deliveries can be can start relatively quickly something that can fit into the trunk of the passenger car can be delivered pretty soon talking about some bigger loads it mostly depends on the availability of the platform like I mean car platform which is capable of delivering the larger parcels or the larger orders

1:39:53or whatever it but we are we're thinking a lot about like getting into this pace and some of our competitors already tried that and we are also very optimistic about like launching delivery by autonomous cars we think it's a great market and great opportunity so speaking of your competitors there are probably dozens working in this autonomous space with Uber what differentiates you all from from the fray or the rest well actually there aren't that many who actually deployed yeah there are very few companies that actually doing rights on Uber or on their own platform I think what differentiates us so first we are actually moving really fast and our actual freeds that we deployed are actually pretty large like much larger compared to the majority of the competition like we all have almost 300 cars operational in both locations

1:40:57it's a pretty big number there are very few players who have more cars actually on their own so we might be speaking not as loud about like scaling plans because we just try to be realistic about the timeless but we yeah we also have a for going plans of scaling into at least three markets in like 2028 and going further afterwards I think another another very important differentiation point is that actually the fact that we have this delivery robots uh it increases significantly our knowledge and intelligence on the operational side and scaling side of the business even though they are much smaller there's a still almost a thousand of autonomous vehicles actually deployed yeah so together robots and cars we're way over a thousand already so that actually sets us to the top of the range in these like I know AV company rating

1:42:06and there's a very important experience that we're getting very few other companies have actually reached that level of intelligence and knowledge about this space yeah so the data and the knowledge and the learnings from the robot supplies to the robot taxis and all that as well I think that's so cool so you spoke of considering to expand to three more cities by 2028 and and that right now you're on you know college campuses and part of the um I guess one of the hurdles is the delivery distance right for the robots but what are the other hurdles remaining for this to become more widespread and adopted across more areas in the country well first of all it's um with regards to deliveries it's mostly limited with the um availability of the uh like infrastructure yeah so uh business that consume logistics as a product is not yet

1:43:10tailored for autonomous deliveries in full so the lack of infrastructure reduces the conversion of the rights and reduces the like a potential number of like a potential like a dressable market in the space that's a big challenge that we're working on together with our partners on the uh autonomous vehicle side it's yeah it is definitely like the development of the tech itself so our rights currently are all supervised so there's a number of things needs to be done so we switch to a fully unsupervised uh amount that's truly on our side uh but also uh as we progress uh the uh infrastructure around it also uh needs to uh needs to be updated yeah that includes availability of like autonomous car platforms from the carman from the carman

1:44:11manufacturers that includes the charging capacity that includes uh deep-ovalability and a lot of all right sir Jay I just want when are we going to see a hundred percent potential for autonomous and i know you could ask that often and i know it's an annoying question because we get asked this all the time from people who don't know trucking but is this a 2035 where i i will expect to get my food deliveries from the autonomous and not the local door dash delivery person or is this going to be like when are we going to get rid of the humans inside these delivery vehicles i'm mostly worried about food it's 1240 we care about food here for hungry so what are we looking at i don't like the language about like getting rid of like a humans uh we are in the partnership here but i think it can come much quicker so i actually think that in a larger series by 2030 the majority of deliveries uh done in downtown let's say dance areas will be already done by

1:45:14different type of uh automated uh delivery devices or cars i think it's totally possible think 2020-28-29 will be the years of the massive scaling of this technology to any sphere every sphere of our life now it's not it's not long away sir Jay we'll appreciate your time thanks for coming in the freightways today we are hungry here you gotta tell me where this japanese restaurant is sir for the moment what is it called you don't even know the name of it i don't know maybe i don't know is it he boned can't buy all right we're gonna we're gonna figure out what this place is i can take my kids if you ship the parcels at scale you know the drill one system quotes the delivery date another picks the carrier another prints the label and some third party audits your invoices six weeks later shipium replaces all of it one platform from promise to payment including their brand new always on audit product which replaces your auditor with real-time monitoring that never sleeps check it out right now at shipium.com that's shipium.com

1:46:37you the world doesn't wait so neither do they wheels on the interstate boots on the sides hands on the shipman we build for the world out here and we build it with the people who live it ideas from the field made real by world-class R&D to keep the operation sharp the front line safely and the world moving from one cab to a global network billions of miles trillions of data points

1:47:39everyone making your operation better and we never build it alone samsara built with operators once a year the entire freight industry stops what it's doing and comes to one place chattanooga tenisee this is f3 the future of freight festival it isn't just a conference it's the largest festival in freight built to pull you all the way in the energy the ideas the atmosphere and the people who move this industry forward over 50 speakers four events across three days founders executives innovators and disruptors all under one roof all asking the same question what comes next on the main stage the sharpest minds in freight take on the biggest questions in the business the trends the technology and the forces shaping what's ahead then the clock starts seven minutes no exceptions the cutting edge of freight tech goes head-to-head live battling for best-in-show when

1:48:42the times up the lights go out and in between the conversations that don't happen anywhere else the connections that change the trajectory of your business the relationships you'll carry long after you leave because when the sessions end the festival begins live entertainment unforgettable experiences a celebration of the world of freight and an energy you won't find at any other event in the industry the leaders you need the access you won't get anywhere else this is where knowledge is shared where deals get done where the future of freight gets decided f3 future of freight festival October 27th and 28th the signal chattanooga tenisee we'll see you there register now at live freightwaves dot com thanks for watching this special edition of freight waves today and we'll be back live every weekday from twelve to two eastern on wednesday