Virtually every industry and every good we consume relies on the movement of freight across our nation’s highways and ports; it’s a roughly $1 trillion industry that moves around $19 trillion of cargo value annually. The commercial heart of this activity involves trucking companies and logistics brokers who match freight capacity with hundreds of thousands of companies that need their goods moved. With long tails of freight supply and demand, the market-making in freight is complex and inefficient — rife with counterparty risk, bad actors, and incomplete/inaccurate information. The costs are borne by market participants who endure bad contracts and fraud (estimated to amount to around $20 million in compromised freight per day), but also societally in the forms of high commercial trucking insurance premiums, supply chain vulnerability, and driving risk.

GenLogs* CEO-founder Ryan Joyce approached this problem informed by his career to date as a CIA case officer mapping terrorist networks in the Middle East. He and his co-founders recognized that the industry lacked an authoritative and real-time source of truth about what freight companies were actually doing. Further, they recognized that advances in video AI opened up the possibility for creating just such a source. Since every truck has to operate on a public highway, a well-implemented nationwide sensor network would be able to identify every individual truck and trailer in operation and map every shipping lane being utilized. Complemented with satellite imagery and cameras installed at ports, this picture could be further enhanced by understanding the nature, capacity, and activity of every node traversed in the network of freight movement.

As they set out to build that nationwide network of cameras they had to overcome considerable operational challenges, including site identification and negotiation, connectivity, regulatory clearance, data assimilation, and many other mundane issues. The reward has been well-worth it: They’ve created a comprehensive view of shipping across the U.S.’s highways and ports whose novelty, comprehensiveness, and real-time accuracy have amazed shippers, brokers, and freight companies alike. For its early adopters GenLogs has become an indispensable tool for brokers matching supply and demand and freight-market participants finding and validating each other.

Further, multiple other parties see value in this unique data set: Commercial auto insurers, state and federal regulators, and law enforcement agencies are finding new insights right on the surface of what GenLogs provides. For example, an insurer can immediately validate whether a trucking company is truthfully representing their states of operation and miles driven (critical inputs into rating insurance risk), while regulators can easily identify violations of hours-of-service rules and “cabotage” (the right to operate within a country, which can be violated by shippers originating in Canada and Mexico). Other examples abound, and we believe the use cases being employed are just scratching the surface of what is possible with the data being captured.

We are proud to collaborate with an outstanding founding team we feel is creatively applying machine-learning, advanced hardware, and video AI to generate strong commercial and prosocial benefits.