About Convoy
Convoy was founded in 2015 by Dan Lewis, a former Amazon executive, and Grant Goodale, with the goal of modernizing the traditionally fragmented, phone- and fax-based process of matching available truck capacity with freight shipments that need to be moved, using technology to reduce inefficiencies such as "empty miles," meaning the significant portion of truck miles driven with no cargo because a trucker had no way to efficiently find a load headed in the direction they needed to travel. Convoy built a digital freight marketplace and automated much of the traditional freight brokerage process, including pricing, load matching, and carrier payment, attracting prominent investors including Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and Al Gore's Generation Investment Management, and reaching a peak valuation of $3.8 billion following a 2022 funding round.
The company's business, however, proved highly exposed to cyclical swings in the freight market: after a period of unusually strong freight demand and pricing during the COVID-19 pandemic's supply chain disruptions, the freight industry entered a severe downturn, sometimes called a "freight recession," starting in 2022, as shipping volumes and prices fell sharply from their pandemic-era peaks. Convoy conducted multiple rounds of layoffs during 2022 and 2023, cutting its workforce from roughly 1,500 to around 500 employees, while spending several months exploring a potential sale to strategic acquirers including Walmart, Amazon, and Maersk. When no acquisition materialized, Convoy abruptly shut down its core operations in October 2023, canceling all active shipments and informing its remaining roughly 500 employees in a single memo that their positions were eliminated immediately. The sudden collapse of a company once considered one of the most promising and well-funded logistics technology startups became a widely discussed cautionary example of the risks facing asset-light freight technology companies during severe industry downturns, and some carriers subsequently reported being owed unpaid amounts for completed freight loads following the shutdown.
