Genpro acquires Cargo Chief’s logistics and transportation services division

Cargo Chief, a Mountain View, Calif.-based provider of transportation and logistics technology focused on providing shippers with securing over-the-road capacity and pricing, said it has entered into a strategic partnership with Rutherford, N.J.-based 3PL Genpro, a provider of North American transportation services across various modes for perishable and non-perishable freight.

The companies said that under the terms of the agreement Genpro has acquired Cargo Chief’s logistics and transportation services division, including its Chicago-based sales team, with Cargo Chief expanding its technology and operational capabilities––like its “ability to match the right shipping capacity with the right shipping load”–– to the entire Genpro network.

Cargo Chief said that shippers and carriers the company serves will continue to be served by the same team, coupled with being able to expand into the added lanes serviced by Genpro. And Genpro pro said that this acquisition benefits its customer base and carrier bandwidth, as well as establish a footprint in the Chicago hub, coupled with leveraging synergies and augmenting technology offerings for its carrier and customer network.

In an interview with LM, Abtin Hamidi, chief vice president and co-founder of Cargo Chief, said that a key driver of this deal was Genpro being consumed with leveraging good technology and a desire to use better tools rather than its current off the shelf system.

“They initially looked at us as a 3PL as a service, which was interesting and what our conversations turned into as an acquisition more so than a 3PL as a service,” he said. “One of the main themes we heard from many parties when talking about this deal before we closed was that technology is a huge component moving forward, and they like that Cargo Chief is building a disruptive technology. The second thing we heard was that more and more of the industry is moving towards a transactional environment, with Cargo Chief having invested all this time and energy into training and finding the right people and all the other things that come into play that are incredibly valuable.” 

From a Cargo Chief perspective, Hamidi said the company was intrigued by this move, as it has spent the last three and a half years building up its brokerage by using technology. And to really get back to its roots, or original mission, which was to build technology, he said the focus on brokerage was key.

“We always knew brokerage was interesting and where the action and data is,” he said. “And now we are at the point where we have the experience and the data and the contacts we need to peel off and do a 100 percent focus on the technology. Genpro was a unique buyer and super engaged in this process and said it was a perfect match and they wanted to do what we were doing. The one lesson we learned from this, and we kind of knew before we did it, was it is really hard to run two different businesses simultaneously. Brokerage is an incredibly challenging business, which requires a 100 percent focus, and so is technology, which is also incredibly difficult. We were trying to do both. It is hard for two businesses to co-exist inside one company, which goes back to our original value propositions in letting the technology people do technology and the transportation people do transportation.”

The immediate focus for this partnership, he said, is making sure the integration with Genpro goes flawlessly and ensure both Cargo Chiefs carriers and customers and Genpro’s customers are aligned in terms of service and benefits.

A key focus for Cargo Chief is on its integration and aggregation technology, which it has focused on in recent years, which has had a longstanding focus on safety and capacity.

And another one is delivering real-time capacity to brokers as its next product.

“We were doing this for ourselves and now we are taking that and shifting it to an external marketplace,” he said. “This is a very unique and customized technology to give to a carrier and is one of roughly 20 modules we can drop into a carrier’s world, whether it is a TMS or a plug-in, or and integration or something else, and it provides visibility into their available capacity and monitor that capacity in real-time and make sure it is accurate and very safe.”

Genpro President Rob Goldstein said in a statement he is bullish about this deal’s prospects.

“We acquired the brokerage business from Cargo Chief, which is primarily a transportation technology application developer,” he said. “While maintaining a relationship with the Silicon Valley transportation, we will have access to technology developed to help improve our market intelligence, and provide us with best practices for our customer service and procurement efficiencies.”