What is FreightFx?
Suppose you work in freight and you'd like to use your favorite AI (e.g. Claude) for help with your daily work: quoting, tracking, getting information from PDFs into your systems. As is, you can't. To make that happen, you'd need to build notoriously complex technical infrastructure and tools that let an AI work between your system and carrier systems. Or you could rent that infrastructure from a company that would likely require you to use their AI.
FreightFx exists to bring freight to your AI in what we think is the easiest way possible. You can see it at freightfx.ai.
Setup looks like this: just add the connector and enter your credentials.
Once you do that, here's what it looks like to turn a quote request from an email to an actual quote:
As another example, you just ask Claude for statuses.
These are just a few functions demonstrated. AI is great at working with images and PDFs. That ability, combined with the ability to work directly in your systems, becomes very useful.
Now you can keep building handy AI-assisted workflows without having to build out the freight infrastructure piece yourself. Think freight-equipped agents from Bedrock, Agent Platform, and others, unleashed.
Is this a TMS? No. We provide tools that integrate your existing AI with a TMS. Though it's worth noting: FreightFx makes it possible to execute TMS functions outside of the TMS.
Are we building our own AI agents? No. We think Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, and others are much better at that, so we just equip their agents with the functions they don't have. You get the best of their development and features, plus the ability to do your freight work.
Note for more technical readers: we are building our own carrier connectivity infrastructure by teaching Claude to prep, build, and audit the most tedious parts. Yes, no more manually grinding through carrier APIs.
If this makes sense to you immediately, this post is for you. It doesn't matter where you are geographically or whether you have startup experience. Let's discuss.
What does the name FreightFx mean?
The core of this project is making freight functions available to AI. The notation f(x) communicates that we're dealing with functions, but doesn't really work in a company or project name. Fx seemed to work best.
Backstory
About two years ago, I flew to Austin to run a few potentially crazy ideas by my good friend and experienced entrepreneur, Ben. This was one of them. I walked him through a few sketches and some early market research, and his response was sensible and straightforward: "I don't understand anything about freight, but let's talk to people who do."
So that's what we did.
We spoke to experts who had either worked as freight executives, financed freight projects, or both. The logic being that they'd know the landscape and could tell us if this was worth attempting, or if they had enough evidence to say we were crazy, or that someone was already doing exactly this. The consensus was that we weren't crazy, and the encouragement was enough to inspire me to start building the thing more seriously, to start showing instead of telling.
The first person who saw the early prototype recommended we apply to OnwardFX in Bentonville. This was sound advice. Before OnwardFX, I had never pitched VCs, and knew relatively little about how the institutional investing world works. After Onward, I had pitched multiple VCs one-on-one, taken a crash course on how it all works from a VC co-founder, and got to meet first hand other founders from many different sectors and hear what they were working on. You can't replace the experience of doing this in person by reading about it.
Unsolicited plug: whether you take a deal or not, I would highly recommend anybody serious about working on a startup get to Bentonville for OnwardFX or an event like it.
After this, we had to take the information on board and make decisions. Also, I needed a break.
What's Next
We need to prove this works in practice. This project is at a point that requires more than just two people. We've very deliberately evaluated the market, vetted the concept, and prototyped. Now we need the right people who understand the project, feel it's something they want to work on, and can contribute meaningfully.
We have total control over the direction of the project, so all ideas are welcomed, the more ambitious the better.
We're most interested in connecting with people who have experience and contacts in the freight industry, who feel with certainty that there is room to change how freight operators work in the AI era. If you've ever felt frustrated that freight was behind and there is a better way to do things, this is for you.