Arrive Logistics expands freight brokerage operation into Canada

October 9, 2023

With nearshoring trends increasing freight flows across North America, Arrive Logistics aims to tap into more freight north of the border with its newest office in Toronto.

The Toronto location helps the Austin, Texas-based freight brokerage provide more localized service to customers across the Great White North.

“The expansion into the Toronto office is really exciting for us, because it puts us in a pretty small class of brokers who have boots on the ground in Canada, the U.S. and Mexico,” Noah Sidenberg, Arrive’s senior director of Canada sales and operations, told FreightWaves. “Bringing the technology that Arrive has built into the Canadian market also puts us in a really small class. And then the culture that we’ve built as well, both in the way that we attack business, the way that we build and scale, and the way that we empower our people I think is going to set us up really excitingly for not only taking over the talent market here but also becoming one of the key brokers in in Canada.”

Arrive’s Toronto office marks the company’s eighth location across North America. The tech-enabled brokerage firm also has offices in Austin, Chicago, San Antonio, Phoenix, Tampa, Florida; Columbus, Ohio; and Guadalajara, Mexico.

Arrive Logistics was co-founded in 2014 by CEO Matt Pyatt and President Eric Dunigan. Today, the firm has 1,700 employees, 6,000 customers and 70,000 carriers in its network. Arrive is one of the largest firms in the freight brokerage industry, with $2.35 billion revenue in 2022.

Canada is currently the No. 2 trading partner of the U.S., behind Mexico, with trade between the two countries totaling $908 billion in 2022. Some of the top commodities traded between Canada and the U.S. include commercial vehicles, passenger vehicles, auto parts, oil, gasoline and other fuels, according to WorldCity.

FreightWaves’ SONAR Outbound Tender Volume Index (OTVI.CAN) for Canada, which measures national freight demand by shippers’ requests for capacity, fell 5% week over week, while on a year-over-year basis, OTVI is down 23%.

Volumes in the Canadian freight market have been falling since late September. To learn more about FreightWaves SONAR, click here.

Previous to opening the Toronto location, Arrive would often assist its Canadian clients from the company’s Chicago office, Sidenberg said.

“This expansion positions us really well to take a bunch of big steps in the Canadian market that would have been potentially more difficult to take without entering the Canadian market physically,” Sidenberg said. “We have a carrier team in Chicago that we built, who are absolute rock stars, but we realized that there’s only so far you can go within the Canadian market from Chicago. So we decided to put boots on the ground.”

Sidenberg said Arrive already has a strong carrier base in Canada, as well as a diverse book of clients. Arrive will provide dry van truckload and other services across Canada, as well as intermodal solutions.

“We do a lot of … almost everything — food and beverage, auto parts, manufacturing of different types,” Sidenberg said. “The Canadian market has a number of industries that are bigger than others, so certainly where there’s the greatest opportunity within Canada, we’ll try to focus on there, but our intention is to remain very diverse within Canada, both with the industry verticals that we work with, as well as the type of solutions that we’re providing.”

Although the freight industry has been soft for most of the year, there is still a lot of opportunity in the market, said Sidenberg, who joined Arrive Logistics in May.

“We’ve seen tremendous opportunity. We’ve seen shippers all over the place who even with the loose market and with capacity being out there right now, they need help with service, they need help with actually making sure that things go the way they need to and that they’ve got communication where they need to,” Sidenberg said. “We’ve seen some pretty exciting growth within the Canadian division since my arrival at Arrive. We’re excited to just keep our foot on the gas and keep building.”