Why Freight Tech Will BOOM After The ‘Apocalypse’

Felipe Capella, CEO of Loadsmart, shares his unique journey from lawyer to freight tech innovator and discusses how his company navigated the ‘Freight Apocalypse’ by pivoting to a blended service and SaaS model. He also sheds light on the growing problem of crime and fraud in freight, emphasizing the need for federal coordination and AI solutions. Watch to learn how Loadsmart is leveraging technology to capture high-margin revenue and ensure resilience in a volatile market.

Loadsmart has shifted so dramatically toward software that SaaS now accounts for half of the company’s gross profit, co-founder and CEO Felipe Capella said in an interview with FreightWaves. The disclosure underscores how the New York-founded, Chicago-based firm has repositioned itself since its 2014 launch as a pure digital freight broker — a model that claimed Convoy, Transfix’s brokerage operations, TruckerPath, Cargomatic, TruckSmarter, NextTrucking, and FreightAI along the way.

Capella said the pivot, which began around 2021, was driven by a deliberate look at unit economics rather than a bet on continued venture funding. With a large research-and-development budget, Loadsmart faced a binary choice: cut costs sharply or create a high-margin revenue line to justify the spend. The company chose the latter, launching ShipperGuide, a transportation management system for midsize and enterprise shippers, and OpenDock, a dock-scheduling platform now deployed in more than 4,500 distribution centers and warehouses across North America.

“We cannot afford to be that fragile,” Capella said, explaining why the firm refused to rely on the assumption that scale alone would eventually validate its cost structure — a logic he said led some competitors to collapse when freight markets turned. “It just takes one bad cycle to destroy your company.”

“A few of these companies that you mentioned did neither — they didn’t adjust their cost structure and they didn’t create a new revenue line that was more high margin that again justifies R&D,” Capella said.

Loadsmart still ranks as a top-70 U.S. freight broker, Capella noted, and the brokerage business has become “quite exciting for the first time in many, many years” as capacity-side constraints tighten the spot market. Even during the prolonged freight downturn of 2023 and 2024, when many brokers saw gross profit shrink, Capella said Loadsmart was “growing pretty healthily.”

The company is now adding a third revenue leg: AI agentic products aimed at enterprise shippers. Capella described a near-term future in which software agents handle the routine clicks and workflow steps that human operators currently perform inside TMS, WMS, and YMS platforms, with workers shifting toward recruiting, deploying, and monitoring those agents — and stepping in only when human judgment is required. Loadsmart is also expanding OpenDock into a full yard management system offering.

On the broader investment climate, Capella said the market has become “definitely a more rational market” after years of zero-interest-rate-fueled valuations stretched venture-backed logistics startups well above public-market comparables such as Descartes, Manhattan Associates, and Trimble. He added that SaaS valuations have been hit hard enough that some companies’ current worth may not cover their preferred equity stack — a dynamic he said makes cash-flow-positive business models essential for survival going forward.

• SaaS now represents half of Loadsmart’s gross profit, driven by its ShipperGuide TMS and OpenDock dock-scheduling platform, which is live in more than 4,500 facilities.
• CEO Felipe Capella says the 2021 decision to add high-margin software revenue — rather than cut R&D — was what separated Loadsmart from digital brokers that went bankrupt during the 2023–2024 freight downturn.
• Loadsmart is launching AI agentic products for enterprise shippers and expanding OpenDock into a full yard management system as its third major revenue line.

This Summary is generated thanks to a transcription of the interview, for the full interview please enjoy the video above.