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KeepTruckin shutters One Point Logistics, brings smart load board to market

(Photo: Jim Allen / FreightWaves)

KeepTruckin, the freight tech unicorn that leveraged an electronic logging device software business into end-to-end visibility technology and a freight-matching marketplace, told employees today that it was shutting down One Point Logistics (OPL), the freight brokerage it acquired in April 2019.

About 30 employees will be reallocated to fleet sales inside KeepTruckin’s organization, but the majority will be laid off. KeepTruckin briefly considered selling OPL, but decided against it in order to retain as many people as possible, KeepTruckin CEO Shoaib Makani said.

The OPL shutdown came amid a wave of large cuts at other freight brokerage companies, including C.H. Robinson and Coyote Logistics. The Passport Research’s team study of fourth quarter earnings revealed that across the freight brokerage space, earnings were down 22.4% on average year-over-year. 

Venture capitalist investors have also become more risk-averse and sensitive to valuation, re-emphasizing unit economics and gross margins. VCs are less willing to value low-margin, non-recurring revenue at tech multiples.


But KeepTruckin never intended to scale a freight brokerage, Makani said. Instead, KeepTruckin needed to understand how freight is transacted to build the technology to power the Smart Load Board. KeepTruckin also needed OPL to feed the first version of its marketplace with freight. But once the tech stack was built out and KeepTruckin was ready to invite third-party brokers and shippers to its load board, it made sense to remove the conflict of interest that came from operating a marketplace and participating in it at the same time.

“In April 2019, we wanted to build an open marketplace where any broker or asset-based carrier could post loads and get access to our capacity, and we believed our data would allow us to build a fundamentally differentiated marketplace by matching intelligently and pushing loads to the right carriers,” Makani said. “We announced that we acquired One Point Logistics so we could learn how to move freight and build matching models to power the marketplace.”

Still, KeepTruckin invested in OPL, more than tripling the brokerage’s headcount and hiring high-powered executives and salespeople from Coyote, GlobalTranz, and FourKites. OPL was adding new account executives as recently as last month. Makani said that, ultimately, freight brokerage proved to be operationally intense and distracted from KeepTruckin’s core mission of building its technology and marketplace.

Makani acknowledged that KeepTruckin’s extensive carrier network needed more freight than OPL could provide, and that the key to getting other 3PLs into the marketplace was by making it truly neutral.


“Now that the marketplace is ready, our intention is to invite the market in, including all 3PLs, large brokers, and asset-based carriers with 3PL arms, and as part of that it didn’t make sense to continue operating OPL,” Makani said. “It’s not ideal to have to shut it down, but if we want to actually realize our mission, we have to remove the conflict and we have to allow all parties to participate on a level playing field.”

In the coming weeks, KeepTruckin will open its marketplace to a wider swath of the 3PL segment, validating and vetting new brokers who will pour loads into the marketplace. Makani said KeepTruckin is already engaging a number of 3PL partners who will participate in the public version of the smart load board.

“We’ve always known that if we could bring trucks online, we could change the way freight moved,” Makani said. “We came across the universal application—electronic logs. We believed that by giving away a free app to drivers, we would build connectivity that would allow us to build the marketplace. Fast forward six and a half years and we have 60,000 carriers, and 300,000 trucks using our ELDs, dash cams, and fleet management. We’ve built this incredible network and now we have the opportunity to build the freight marketplace of the future.”

23 Comments

  1. Wise up Trucking Community part 2

    Forgot to mention….Keep Truckin is owned by Google. Googles Investment Arm put a big chunk of money into KT. Does anyone wonder why Google would want to be an investor? DATA!!!!!!!! The trucking community is so disjointed it’s almost comical. I don’t know if anyone can get the small and midsize carriers on the same page. Everyone wonders why rates are terrible and trucking sucks. The biggest reason, there is no leader to help the carriers and drivers navigate around all the land mines being put in their way by the very people they think are there to help them. All these companies are out for one thing, investor money. They are trying to come up with the next big thing and sell it. They don’t care who gets hurt in the process. Who is pushing Driverless trucks? Once the big boys get driverless trucks scaled then it’s by-by trucking as we know it. Another blow to blue collar America just like NAFTA almost 30 years ago. We are just to dumb to realize the power we have as a trucking community if we could unite and become one.

  2. Dale

    Keeptruckin got empty of leaders and employees who did run the business in the past, idiots are running the company and they are there to say yes to management. Kudos the to the exec. team to make so many people unemployed!!!
    Forgot to mention KT recognized as “Best Place to Work in 2019” and they are always proud of their culture. This is the reality of Keeptruckin’s culture, they cut job for +100 people in a day!

  3. I heard thru the grapevine...

    Several KT leaders left in the past several months because their concerns and recommendations were dismissed by the founders (ie excessive engineering hiring, bloated / top heavy mgmt, over investment in a low / negative margin business, rampant nepotism, unaddressed bizops system issues, degrading unit economics, general propensity to light money on fire b/c “Uber did it”, etc).

    Here’s my shocked face 😐

  4. Observer

    Keeptruckin suffers from poor operations and strategy for a long-time. Now, they have to deal with cash flow and bad reputation as well. This shutdown shows executives don’t have a general idea about the business outlook as they hired a new General Manager for One Point less than 2 months ago and they closed the business last Friday.
    COO and his team proved their incompetencies before, now they cannot deal with this chaotic situation inside the KT, I guess people start to leave and KT would have serious issues with enterprise account acquisition.

    Best of luck

  5. Observer

    Keeptruckin suffers from poor operations and strategy for a long-time. Now, they have to deal with cash flow and bad reputation as well. This shutdown shows executives don’t have a general idea about the business outlook as they hired a new General Manager for One Point less than 2 months ago and they closed the business last Friday.
    COO and his team proved their incompetencies before, now they cannot deal with this chaotic situation inside the KT, I guess people start to leave and KT would have serious issues with enterprise account acquisition.

  6. Wise up trucking community

    Truckers should flee from Keep Truckin and all other data sucking tech companies. They are working to help shippers and brokers keep freight rates as low as possible. All of this new technology is useless for the fleet owners and owner-operators. It keeps the old broker models in place and it does nothing to make more money for the truck owners and drivers. Fleet Owners need to wake up. Everyone is using your data to keep you at a disadvantage with shippers and brokers. You are hurting the industry so much by being involved with companies like Keep Truckin. Go find an ELD company that wants to be an ELD company and hopefully doesn’t share your data. You need to wise up before its too late and you put yourself out of business. Keep Truckin is only trying to build itself up for a big payday when they sell. You are helping people who despise you and your profession become multi-millionaires by using your ELD subscription and data. It is really sad when hard-working truckers and fleet owners cant make a living doing the actual work but others become mega-wealthy skimming data and being the middle man between shippers and carriers.

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John Paul Hampstead

John Paul conducts research on multimodal freight markets and holds a Ph.D. in English literature from the University of Michigan. Prior to building a research team at FreightWaves, JP spent two years on the editorial side covering trucking markets, freight brokerage, and M&A.