Emerge names Crawford as president

Scottsdale, Arizona-based Emerge, a provider of its proprietary Private Freight Marketplace (PFM) and TMS focused on accelerating productivity and increasing visibility for supply chain stakeholders, recently announced it has named Grant Crawford as the company’s new president.

Prior to this announcement, Crawford had been serving as Emerge’s chief commercial officer. An industry veteran, Crawford has worn many hats throughout his career. He served as former vice president of international operations for FedEx Freight and was part of the company’s FedEx Ground subsidiary, when it was a startup in 1991. Crawford also served as president of Roadrunner Transportation Systems.

Emerge officials said that Crawford will lead the company’s team of logistics experts, adding that his experience and leadership will provide invaluable guidance to the Emerge team as the organization and its services continue to grow and evolve.

“I’m thrilled for the opportunity to lead the Emerge Team during this crucial time,” Crawford said in a statement. “From an industry perspective, we must have an increased awareness to information and be historically efficient. Technology-driven tools that provide this information and allow us to maximize efficiencies will be vital going forward. The greater market must be provided visibility to where every single space of capacity is, due to convergence of record freight volumes coinciding with the fact that there are less drivers moving up and down the road. Ultimately that’s what Emerge does, is help connect [shippers] to that available capacity.”

Emerge was established in early 2018 by Andrew Leto and Michael Leto, siblings whose transportation roots run deep, as their father operated an air freight business, followed by their ownership of GlobalTranz, a full-service 3PL focused on freight brokerage and technology, whom was acquired last year by The Jordan Company, a private equity firm, for more than $400 million. 

Within Emerge’s cloud-based PFM and TMS, the company is able to provide myriad services for truckload and less-than-truckload (LTL) shippers in various ways, including combining quoting and tendering, carrier management, real-time tracking, data-driven analytics, streamlined customer billing, and being able to connect and network with new players. The company explained that providing true real-time visibility and access to all available capacity in the U.S. are chief objectives, with its PFM and TMS platform also including chat, analytics, history, and automated lane/repeat shipment creation.

In November 2018, Emerge announced it raised $20 million in a seed round, which was led by Greycroft, a venture capital firm based in Los Angeles and New York, in addition to participation from other investors as well. With Greycroft's investment into Emerge, Emerge said the investment provides the opportunity for the company to “scale up” its business so it can hit the market running.