FreightVana, a third-party logistics startup based in Phoenix, has moved into new office space to accommodate its rapidly growing team and business.
FreightVana launched about a year ago to help connect the people shipping products and the carriers that move them from place to place. The company’s co-founders, Shannon Breen and John Gamero, both grew up in the Valley and previously worked as executives at Phoenix-based Knight-Swift Transportation.
This time last year the company had 30 employees in a 7,000-square-foot space. But after a year of speedy growth, the company recently moved into an 18,000-square-foot office at 2600 Tower on Central Avenue in Phoenix.
Breen told AZ Inno that the company employs about 80 people now and they expect to reach a headcount of 90 by the end of this year and 150 by the end of next year, most of whom will be based in midtown Phoenix.
“Most of us are Arizona natives who have a passion for the Valley, want to run a successful headquarters centralized here in the Valley,” he said. “Just a lot of homegrown talent here from the state of Arizona that has come together to kind of take on some national challenges and to build this brand.”
The national challenges Breen and FreightVana are working to counter include a shortage of truck drivers in the United States and a supply chain that got tangled during the Covid-19 pandemic.
New drop trailer program
Earlier this year FreightVana introduced "FreightVana x," a so-called drop trailer or power-only program designed to help smaller carriers compete with mega carriers by giving drivers more flexibility.
Typically, freight is moved using the live load system, where a driver has to pick up and deliver loads at set times. With a drop trailer program, freight is preloaded into trailers so drivers can pick up and drop off on a looser schedule. Trailers can also be dropped off at receiving yards and left for unloading later, giving drivers a chance to get back on the road.
To facilitate this drop trailer program, FreightVana has bought its own trailers that independent truck drivers, called owner-operators, can use to haul freight for customers. FreightVana currently has 400 trailers out across the country and aims to have 1,000 in its fleet by the end of the year.
“It's a beautiful intersection of unlocking that potential for small guys [that lack trailer capacity] ... and a large carrier who has all the capacity needs, but gives the shipper limited optionality,” Breen said. “We kind of run right in that middle ground.”
FreightVana is working with Wabash (NYSE: WNC), the nation’s largest semitrailer maker, to get access to more trailers and bulk up this drop trailer program.
“We’re excited to see the growth in power-only models that use trailers in new and interesting ways to solve for persistent driver shortages, detention times at shippers’ docks, and an overall lack of network fluidity,” Wabash President and CEO Brent Yeagy said in a July statement.
“The transportation and logistics markets are changing, and Wabash intends to remain at the forefront of this change as a thought leader and technology partner. We’ve built a strong collaborative relationship with the team at FreightVana over the last year, and we believe, together, we can solve some of the transportation industry’s most meaningful challenges.”
Breen and Gamero founded FreightVana with the goal of being a transparent business partner, a trait they say can be lacking in the industry. These new FreightVana trailers have cargo sensors throughout so everyone involved knows the status of a given load.
“We want to take care of our shippers, take care of our carriers and have collaborative partners like Wabash that can truly deliver different outcomes,” Breen said.
