Request for Startups

Q2 2025

Breakdown Services for Long Haul Trucking

Unlike typical roadside assistance for passenger cars, truck drivers face significant challenges with vehicle breakdowns, experiencing around 11M incidents annually—about 3 breakdowns per truck each year. Even well-maintained fleets encounter 1-2 breakdowns per truck, primarily due to tire, brake, and electrical system issues, creating a critical need for more sophisticated roadside support. 

The opportunity lies in developing a comprehensive solution that combines proactive maintenance with an integrated support network, potentially addressing the pain points of both large fleets and independent owner operators, and leveraging agentic tooling to automate the service-heavy elements of the business.

An Asset-lite Network of Qualified Mexican Manufacturing Companies

This opportunity was inspired by the Stord “Partner Network” model which aggregates qualified warehouses and fulfillment centers through their strict vendor onboarding process and technology tools.  We see a similar opportunity to connect Mexico's fragmented manufacturing sector, where 90% of manufacturers are small and medium-sized businesses struggling to attract large customers. The 6k-strong maquiladora system, which enables foreign companies to manufacture in Mexico for export, provides a promising foundation when accounting for current nearshoring trends and even with the tariff headwinds of the current administration. 

This asset-lite aggregation of manufacturing capacity would drive better utilization and greater revenues to the maquiladora manufacturers which builds trust to sell further technology enablement. Adjacent opportunities might include transportation solutions, working capital support, and insurance solutions.

The Future of QA on the Factory Floor

As manufacturing returns onshore, companies will focus on products where demand remains stable despite higher shelf prices — which will be necessary when shifting production away from China.  It is unlikely that many of these manufacturing facilities  will be fully automated and will continue to rely on human labor whose manual dexterity remains superior to existing robots. The challenge is that humans are not consistently accurate, thereby creating quality control challenges. 

There's an opportunity for advanced QA systems that monitor work undertaken by frontline staff in real-time, quickly highlighting issues and helping to improve worker output. This data could eventually be used for post-training of LLMs to fine tune foundational robotics for specific manufacturing tasks. An effective solution could monitor the production process itself (not just final products), use easily installed cameras that don't disrupt workflows, and charge based on production volume. This approach would bridge today's human-centered manufacturing with tomorrow's more automated systems.

Tackling Freight Fraud

The freight industry faces a significant surge in fraud, with CargoNet reporting a 430% year-over-year increase in incidents in 2024, encompassing various deceptive practices like cargo theft, double brokering, and identity fraud. Common methods include brokers re-brokering shipments without authorization, thieves impersonating carriers to steal cargo or mischarge shippers, and fuel-related fraudulent activities that exploit financial vulnerabilities in the transportation ecosystem. 

We believe that a potential winning solution lies in developing an AI-powered fraud prevention system that can proactively identify anomalies, implement robust "Know Your Customer" verification processes, and collaborate with insurers to mitigate risks, recognizing that while fraud can't be completely eliminated, it can be substantially reduced.

Security Layer for Industrial Assets

The industrial cybersecurity landscape has dramatically shifted, with US government data revealing a near-doubling of vulnerabilities in 2023 to 1.3k, predominantly in critical infrastructure sectors like energy, manufacturing, and transportation. These vulnerabilities stem from legacy protocols developed pre-internet, insecure default configurations, and expansive connected asset networks that can encompass 10-50k nodes per industrial site. 

The strategic approach involves creating solutions that can seamlessly integrate with existing systems, focusing on industry-specific assets and potentially leveraging open-source frameworks to accelerate market penetration and address the escalating cybersecurity risks.

Improved Demand Forecasting

Demand forecasting is a complex, manual process that often achieves accuracy rates as low as 55% due to volatile markets, changing consumer behaviors, and global disruptions. Traditional statistical models that are often run in gnarly Excel workbooks require subjective adjustments that create further errors.

AI presents an opportunity to break down data silos by integrating information scattered across systems, including contextual details hidden in communications like sales rep emails. By combining Large Language Models with advanced real-time analytics, companies could dramatically improve forecast accuracy. We believe that the ideal solution would seamlessly integrate with existing workflows across multiple stakeholders, manage external disruptions beyond basic modelling capabilities, and translate forecasts into actionable insights—such as triggering marketing campaigns during slow periods or expediting restocks to prevent shortages.

Next-gen Parcel Network for Sensitive Goods

Traditional parcel networks cannot effectively handle sensitive goods that include, but are not limited to, cold chain (meal kits), regulated products (alcohol), or high-value packages (electronics) that require signatures. For cold chains, shorter 2-3 hour delivery windows can reduce shipping costs by up to 50% because it reduces the need for costly insulation and packaging.

We believe a next-gen network might begin with an asset-lite model using existing local delivery capability, but it may need to supplement this with its own assets over time to maintain consistent service quality. Profitability would depend on operational excellence, targeted automation, and sophisticated route optimization. The approach would need to accommodate the different pickup requirements across the various customer types while ensuring precise delivery scheduling that recipients can rely on.

Operating System for Overweight/Oversized Freight

Oversize freight transport, such as the movement of heavy equipment, industrial materials such as beams/concrete blocks, and even prefabricated structures, involves complex parameters and constraints unlike standard shipping. While there are over 70k carriers who claim to handle oversize/overweight loads, it remains a specialty market filled with exceptions and expertise gaps. As the US reindustrializes, safely transporting large equipment and materials on time becomes increasingly critical.

A solution would likely need to be comprehensive rather than address isolated pain points, creating the opportunity to build an end-to-end operating system. Implementation challenges include gaining adoption from dispatchers in this traditional segment of the trucking industry, who might view AI solutions as threats rather than helpful tools. We would add that a specialized brokerage with ambitions to become multi-modal might also be worth contemplating to improve value capture in a market estimated at $83B in the US.

The Carrier’s Agent

At present, over 60% of carriers operate either at break-even or a loss with no relief in sight given climbing fuel costs, insurance, labor, and equipment costs. Newly imposed tariffs will dampen demand further, putting greater pressure on transportation spot rates. Despite all the operational complexity, the long tail of carriers is still largely reliant on legacy solutions, emails and spreadsheets.

We believe there is a meaningful opportunity to automate away a significant proportion of labor using an AI copilot which can help reduce the cost to serve  per load by providing an agentic solution to assume back office operations. The ideal solution for carriers should prioritize empowering dispatchers rather than replacing them, focusing on automation to handle mundane tasks while the dispatcher leans in on relationships and interactions with the drivers that haul freight. Recognizing the cyclical nature of the industry and carrier aversion to fixed costs, a traditional SaaS model is unlikely to succeed. Instead, a Services-as-Software approach with volume/task-based pricing offers a more compelling and financially stable option.

Industrial Circularity Enablement

The US critical minerals landscape is at an inflection point, with full import dependency for 12 of the 50 designated critical minerals and significant reliance on China, which dominates 60% of global production and 85% of processing capacity. As strategic decoupling efforts accelerate, the US must simultaneously diversify sourcing and scale domestic recovery. A key vector for doing so lies in tapping underutilized domestic circularity opportunities - recycling existing supply. This will require meaningful supply chain integrations and seamlessly connecting raw materials with recyclers and manufacturers.

This solution will need to go beyond a straightforward B2B marketplace for these goods to facilitate a venture-scale opportunity and will have to construct a business model that can accommodate what are often low-margin and volatile inputs. The industry is needed to accelerate its advanced recycling capabilities, for example, robotics disassembly of consumer electronics and EVs.  

Revenue Ops For Logistics Companies

RevOps is the alignment of sales, marketing, and customer success teams across processes, data, and technology to drive revenue growth more efficiently and predictably. This concept has become table stakes among software companies but most freight brokers, 3PLs, and logistics providers still rely on disconnected spreadsheets, homegrown CRMs, and gut-feel forecasting to drive revenue. The US logistics industry, conservatively estimated to be $500B could be experiencing revenue leakage of 5-10% or $25-50B per year. Rising acquisition costs and tighter margins push logistics firms to unify data, automate workflows, and drive predictable growth.

A verticalized RevOps platform purpose-built for the complexity of logistics, which oftentimes includes volumes and rates across different lanes, regions, or areas of the network, can unlock margin, reduce churn, improve customer outcomes, as well as accelerate top-line growth in a market that’s undergoing rapid digitization. We’d assume a winning solution would require integrations with TMS, CRM, and pricing systems to truly shine.