We Are in For the Long Haul With project44

We are excited to announce Emergence Capital’s investment in project44 – a Chicago-based company providing industry leading supply chain visibility and connectivity. CEO Jett McCandless and his team are building a cloud-based platform that helps shippers, carriers and third party logistics firms (“3PLs”) communicate and transact in real-time. By leveraging modern APIs and cloud infrastructure, project44 is bringing the freight logistics industry into the internet era. All of us at Emergence Capital were drawn to Jett’s vision to streamline the way goods move through the value chain from manufacturer all the way to end consumer.

Our project44 investment is a direct result of years of work around our industry cloud thesis. As the only venture investor in Veeva Systems, we saw firsthand the power of focusing cloud software in one industry vertical. We believe project44 will take advantage of their initial industry focus within the freight trucking industry to follow a similar path. They have already sold to the largest carriers and 3PLs in their initial less-than-truckload (“LTL”) market aggregating 99.9% of the available capacity. In only the second year of platform operation, the project44 APIs are facilitating 2.1MM API transactions on a daily basis. Over the next few years, we believe that project44 will expand vertically within the freight industry to include new modalities within trucking, shipping and rail.

We believe that a modern freight platform will move beyond simply facilitating transactions. When we spoke with project44 customers, we heard repeatedly that project44 bring unique possibilities to enhance their revenue opportunities. Carriers are excited to introduce dynamic pricing engines onto the project44 platform. Shippers are interested in the predictive analytics capabilities that the project44 network can provide into shipping times, availability and pricing. During our diligence, we discovered a number of ways that project44 can become invaluable as the platform of record for how the freight industry transacts.

Jett McCandless, Founder and CEO of project44, has attracted a unique blend of industry veterans like President Tommy Barnes and SaaS technology experts like CTO Wally Ibrahim. As we spent more time with the executive team, we became more excited that this is the right core team that can leverage their industry domain expertise to usher in a new modern technology era. The incredible passion and dedication of this team is visible and extends to the entire employee base.

At Emergence Capital, we aspire to be the most important partner to entrepreneurs who share our passion for transforming the way business works. project44 is one of those truly exceptional opportunities and we are so proud to work with Jett, Tommy, Wally and the entire project44 team to help them unlock their potential. We are also looking forward to working with co-investors Stuart Larkins and Jason Duboe of Chicago Ventures.