New App Aims to Reinvent and Disrupt the Trucking Industry

With the U.S. economy bouncing back after the devastating recession that ended a few years ago, the trucking industry is one sector that is poised for a rapid growth in years to come. According to the American Trucking Association, the trucking industry saw a total revenue of just over $700 billion in 2014, and it's expected to continue growing for at least for another decade.

Driver Shortage and Strict Regulations as Huge Obstacles

However, it's also an industry that is facing a series of challenges, such as the huge driver shortage and tightening regulations that are holding back many trucking companies. What's more, the way that shipments are being made today, with communication between shippers and carriers going through brokers, which makes it pretty complicated and time-consuming. These, coupled with many other challenges, mean that the industry is ripe for disruption, and that's exactly what a new American startup aims to take advantage of.

App for Increased Efficiency

Convoy, a Seattle-based startup, has created a mobile app that aims to facilitate the process of connecting trucking companies with shippers, by eliminating brokers - who essentially act as middlemen - and help enable a faster and more cost-effective way of moving freight.
The app is basically an online service that helps those who need to ship something find local trucking companies more easily and get quotes for the service they need in an instant, saving them valuable time and money. All that shippers have to do is enter several parameters that the service requires in order to provide them with a quote and connect them with the carrier that fits them the most, in terms of price, location and a few other factors.
The parameters that are required include cargo weight and type, the address of the shipper and the shipping address, which Convoy then uses to calculate costs and generate a price for them. The app then alerts truckers and provides them with the potential fee, and they can choose to accept or reject the freight.
This way, the app eliminates dozens of phone calls that shippers usually have to make before finally arranging transfer for their freight, and helps move goods a lot faster.
"It takes a lot of human error out," says Dan Lewis, Convoy's founder and CEO. "Phone calls don't scale; if you can get a service that accepts jobs and they can better manage their fleet, it makes their lives easier."
By using Convoy app, shippers will be able to reduce their costs significantly, since it will charge much less than brokers do nowadays. Convoy can charge less by taking various factors into account, such as location, type of cargo and how fast the shipper wants their freight to be moved, and then using its own algorithms to come up with the optimal price for each transaction.
Convoy recently received $2.5 million in seed funding from some very high-profile names, such as Jeff Bezos, the founder and CEO of Amazon, the founder and chairman of Salesforce.com, Marc Benioff, and Howard Behar, former president of Starbucks.
This means that Convoy is already getting the support from serious investors and is bound to make a great impact on the trucking industry, which obviously needs to be reinvented.