Jett McCandless, founder and CEO of project44 and LSP44, received the FreightTech Vanguard Award at FreightWaves’ F3: Future of Freight Festival dinner Monday, recognizing his contributions to the freight and logistics industry.
FreightWaves presented the award during F3 in Chattanooga, Tennessee, an annual event focused on innovation and the future of freight. The event also featured the FreightTech 25, an annual ranking of the 25 most influential freight technology companies selected from the broader FreightTech 100, which was announced in late September.
While the FreightTech rankings recognize companies for their current influence, the Vanguard Award recognizes founders for their long-term impact. McCandless was independently selected by FreightWaves for the award.
“So many technologies and innovations are driven by the vision, the relentlessness, the grind of our founders,” FreightWaves CEO Craig Fuller said as he presented the award. “We thought that this particular founder represented the best example of all of those characteristics.”
For McCandless, receiving that award on the F3 stage meant a lot.
“To have that recognition from him (Fuller) has made for one of the most proud moments of my life,” McCandless said.
McCandless founded project44 in 2014 to provide real-time visibility into shipments and supply chains. The company connects shippers, carriers and logistics providers with shipment data to help businesses track freight and manage transportation operations.
In July, project44 split its operations into two businesses: project44, which focuses on enterprise shippers, and LSP44, which provides artificial intelligence agents and application programming interfaces to logistics service providers, including freight brokers, forwarders and third-party logistics companies.
Fuller said project44 “defined a category” and has since extended its platform beyond where it started. He said McCandless’ path is what the award is meant to honor.
“I know that what they have built is not what they initially envisioned,” Fuller said. “I think that’s ultimately what being a founder is all about: applying grit, dedication, innovation, at times humility, admitting that things you set out to do may not be relevant currently, that markets change.”
McCandless dedicated the award to the people who handle freight’s worst moments.
“I want to accept this award on behalf of everyone who’s picked up the phone at 2 a.m. because a load went sideways,” McCandless said. “I’ve been that person, and I know a lot of you here have been too.”
Over the past decade, project44 has built a network that McCandless said now covers 286,000 carriers in 194 countries and territories and handles more than 700 million synchronized events a day.
The company’s next chapter is focused on AI agents. Building an agent is now the easy part, what makes one useful is how well it understands the freight industry and the different needs of the businesses operating within it, McCandless noted.
“‘On time’ means something totally different for a retailer than it does for a port,” McCandless said. “An agent that doesn’t know that isn’t smart. It’s just confidently wrong.”
McCandless described a future in which the 2 a.m. call never happens because the system already knows what went wrong, what the reroute options are and which carriers are best suited to handle it.
McCandless closed with a message for other founders in the room.
“To every founder out there doing the hard work, the unglamorous work: keep going,” he said.
The post Jett McCandless named first FreightTech Vanguard Award winner at F3 appeared first on FreightWaves.
