Nashville,Tennessee-based FreightWise has acquired transportation management system software provider Kuebix from Trimble Inc.
The acquisition was announced Thursday and comes just over a year after Trimble announced it was shutting down Kuebix as the company pivoted to another platform.
FreightWise CEO Chris Cochran said as soon as he heard the news that Trimble was sunsetting Kuebix, he was interested in buying the TMS provider, which once had one of the largest connected shipping communities in North America on its cloud-based platform.
“What attracted me to it is that it’s a great brand and a great application that actually stood up to a wide range of shippers,” Cochran told FreightWaves. “They have an extremely good presence in the small and midsize (SMB) shipper business market, and they also have an emerging presence in the large shipper market.”
FreightWise is a logistics technology company founded in 2014 by Cochran and Vice President of Sales Alex Rustioni. The platform aims to help businesses streamline freight processes and save money by combining their carrier volume and relationships to reduce freight costs.
FreightWise’s focus includes parcel, less-than-truckload, truckload and international freight modes.
The acquisition of Kuebix is a strategic step for FreightWise as it looks to serve a wider spectrum of customers with diverse service models. Cochran said Kuebix’s presence in the market and its growing large shipper customer base is part of what made the acquisition a good fit.
“[Kuebix’s clients] are a little bit of a different client profile than what FreightWise typically has and manages within our portfolio,” Cochran said. “We were attracted to Kuebix because not only is it a great application, with their customers, it actually allows us to have more products and a wider range to offer to the marketplace.”
Kuebix was founded in 2008 by Dan Clark in Maynard, Massachusetts. Supply chain technology provider Trimble (NASDAQ: TRMB) acquired Kuebix for $200 million in 2020, with the aim of connecting its carrier clients to Kuebix’s network of more than 21,000 shipping companies.
In September 2022, Trimble said it would close Kuebix by the end of 2025 as it pivots to Engage Lane, a recently launched transportation procurement platform.
Trimble announced in February that FreightWise was one of five companies selected as preferred launch partners to help its Kuebix customers transition to a new TMS provider. Other TMS providers selected included Shipwell, MyCarrier, PCS Software and 3GTMS.
“They wanted to offer a handful of companies that they have done a little bit of due diligence on as a glide path, an easy path to move off of Kuebix,” Cochran said. “We were on that list as a core SMB TMS, through due diligence that their team did with our team. We’d already had a relationship before that, but those conversations led to the acquisition.”
The integration of Kuebix into FreightWise is slated to begin immediately, and the transfer of Kuebix operations and customers will be seamless and not impact daily operations, Cochran said.
Kuebix will retain its name under FreightWise.
While the number of shippers in the Kuebix network has declined from two years ago, the TMS is still providing solutions to a robust customer base on its platform and has room for more innovation and growth, Cochran said.
“There’s still over 1,000 shippers active on the application. If you combine that with the customers that FreightWise has on our own TMS, which is mostly a managed service TMS, it makes us one of the top TMS platforms in the country,” Cochran said. “We’re really excited for the acquisition.”
Cochran would not disclose how much FreightWise paid for Kuebix but said it was less than Trimble paid for the company.
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