Problem

Freight coordination remains a labor-intensive, fragmented process: brokers and logistics teams often rely on phone calls and email to tender, book, track, and manage shipments. For manufacturers and distributors, the pain is especially acute when freight moves among multiple plants, warehouses, dealers, or customers across LTL and truckload networks. The resulting costs include coordinator headcount, broker margins, poor visibility, empty miles, and missed consolidation opportunities. Cartage’s clearest use case is automating this recurring complexity for high-volume shippers; in its Friant example, consolidating compatible loads reduced waste, empty miles, and freight spend.

Product / Service

Cartage’s Wilson is a service-as-software logistics coordinator that manages freight end to end. It creates loads, sources or tenders capacity, books carriers, tracks shipments, handles communications, and manages exceptions. Rather than requiring shippers or carriers to adopt a new communication channel, Wilson works through familiar workflows such as email and phone, with Cartage’s operations team backing up the AI for exceptions and escalations.

The delivery model combines a specialized freight AI with human support. Wilson can tender LTL shipments according to routing guides, procure truckload capacity, negotiate within customer-defined guardrails, consolidate compatible orders, and maintain carrier-performance intelligence. Cartage says the benefit is a full logistics function without equivalent headcount, faster execution, lower freight costs, and greater shipment transparency; its current site claims more than 500 shipments handled daily, 10x human speed, and 98.7% autonomous decision-making.

Market

Cartage competes in freight coordination, freight brokerage, and logistics-operations automation. Its distinctive positioning is “service-as-software”: it aims to replace or materially reduce the work performed by traditional freight brokers and internal logistics teams, rather than simply provide another system of record. Those incumbent brokers and in-house coordinators are the clearest alternatives identified in the research; no named direct software competitor was established.

Cartage is operating commercially rather than being pre-revenue. Y Combinator reported that the company had signed eight shipper customers after its pivot, previously reached $150,000 in ARR while selling software to brokers, and was pacing toward coordinating more than $2 million of freight in six months. FreightWaves reported a $3.3 million seed round in October 2024, while Cartage’s 2026 site states that it has raised $8 million and handles 500-plus shipments daily. The company also publishes U.S. customer case studies, including Friant, although current revenue and profitability are not disclosed.