New Name, New Funding: Atlanta’s Graypool Targets Trucking’s Missed Revenue
ATLANTA, October 21 (Hypepotamus) - A freight and logistics startup in Atlanta has a new name, which its CEO says better reflects where the company is growing next.
Graypool, formerly HOPTEK, provides AI freight monetization for asset-based carriers. The premise behind its technology is simple enough: help trucking carriers earn more from every truck. But as those around the trucking and logistics industry know, that is often a huge challenge.
“Every fleet has two kinds of freight that are easy to understand. There is contract freight. You know the lane, the rate, and the customer. And there is spot freight on the open boards. Anybody can bid on it. But a lot of freight lives between those two. A tender comes in at a bad rate. A truck sits empty at the end of a run. A load is almost on your lane, but not quite. Most carriers reject that freight, or they deadhead, and that money goes away. We call that the gray zone,” CEO Marc Held told Hypepotamus.
That gray zone is exactly where Graypool fits in. The goal is to help carriers “accept the right loads at the right price, find good freight to fill the gaps, and move freight to other trusted carriers when it does not fit their network.”
Recent Funding News
Alongside the new name, Graypool has recently brought on new capital partners.
The team recently announced it raised a $5 million pre-seed round, led by Omaha-based Werner Enterprises, with participation from Chicago-based Kearney, Singapore-based LPX Partners, Atlanta-based Venture 53, and Supply chain technology investors Jerk Ventures.
Bringing on a carrier, a 3PL, a strategy partner, an industry fund, and a group of operators as early investors was deliberate, according to Held.
“We had one rule for early partners: everyone on the cap table must know freight from the inside. Each of these partners sees a different part of the market, and together they cover the full chain,” added Held. “Werner is our anchor customer. They run more than a million dollars of freight through our platform every week, and our AI handles about 90 percent of those decisions. When a top-ten carrier puts its own freight and its own money behind you, other carriers listen.”
The company currently has 30 employees, with 7 based in the Atlanta area.
Maija Ehlinger
Get To Know The CEO
Held took on the company’s CEO position in February of this year, bringing together his background in freight, data, and finance.
Previously, Held co-founded ODYN (acquired by Turvo) and founded Weft, a global logistics data company acquired by DMGT-owned Genscape. He also served as President of Greenscreens (acquired by Triumph Financial), a platform which used market data to price freight for brokers.
“Those companies taught me how to turn raw freight data into decisions that people trust with real money,” he told Hypepotamus. “On [the] finance [side], I started in factoring and trade finance, and started Fishtail, which finances cross-border trade between the U.S. and Mexico. Finance teaches you that every load is an asset with a price, a risk, and a margin. That is how we help carriers look at their freight. On freight, everything I have done has been for the people who move goods. I know what a dispatcher does at 6 a.m., and I know why a carrier rejects a tender.”
Held added that now is the right time to be scaling Graypool, saying that “the next step is to help every asset-based carrier make more money from every truck and every load. That is a data and pricing problem, and my background fits it.”
Maija Ehlinger
The Southeast’s Freight World
Graypool is tackling a problem with particular relevance in the Southeast, where moving goods is a major part of the regional economy. UPS is headquartered in Atlanta and FedEx is based in Memphis, for example.
The region’s technology companies are addressing different parts of the trucking and freight industry. Other startups in the industry include RoadSync, Relay Payments, and Variant, while Chattanooga is also home to freight news publication FreightWaves.
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Featured Photo by Bhargav Panchal / Unsplash
