Some Convoy carriers say collapsed startup owes them thousands of dollars

Several trucking companies that hauled loads for Convoy, a digital freight brokerage that shut down in October, said the defunct company owes them thousands of dollars for loads they completed.

Before Convoy closed, it had some 80,000 carriers in its network and more than 500 employees. On Oct. 18, Convoy employees told its carriers that all loads were suspended. One former employee told FreightWaves he assumed that a company was going to acquire Convoy, while another believed there was just a temporary outage of the load board.

Instead, the freight brokerage shuttered on Oct. 19. Most of its 500-odd employees were immediately laid off with no severance pay, save for a small team of workers. On Nov. 1, Flexport, a digital freight forwarder, announced it was acquiring Convoy’s technology but none of its liabilities or assets.

Since opening in 2015, Convoy had billed itself as an app that would empower small trucking businesses, including one-person operators and small fleets. Convoy aimed to eliminate waste from the supply chain chiefly through freeing up truck capacity to the market. On that mission, the Seattle-based startup had attracted nearly $1 billion in funding from the big leagues. Such investors included Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and prominent firms like T. Rowe Price and CapitalG.

That cash seems elusive now. The sudden shutdown has left Convoy carriers scrambling for work during a freight downturn. It’s also left several saying they’re owed thousands of dollars for work completed during the final days that the company existed.

FreightWaves spoke to three carriers that said they’ve been unable to recover payments from Convoy. Each provided documentation to FreightWaves indicating that they had not received payment for loads completed. FreightWaves also spoke to two former Convoy employees who worked with carriers.

Source: freightwaves.com