Transfix, recently out of the brokerage business, offering its first software solution
Transitions can take a long time for any company, but Jonathan Salama, CEO and co-founder of Transfix, said that moving from being a digital brokerage to a supplier of SaaS solutions is a path made easier by the fact that Transfix was always building and improving the broker-focused technology it was going to need for its own operations.
“It was a lot faster for us because we already had the right building blocks,” Salama said in an interview with FreightWaves.
The Transfix transformation has its first tangible product, a suite of AI-based solutions that the one-time digital brokerage was developing for its own internal use. The company announced its availability last week.
The full extent of just how much Transfix has changed could be seen when Salama was asked if Transfix had eyed the possibility of remaining a digital broker while concurrently offering software solutions to the brokerage community.
Brokers won’t buy from brokers
“I don’t believe a broker would buy software from another broker,” Salama said. “I don’t think we were ever going to attempt that.”
Just weeks after Transfix announced it was selling its digital brokerage operations to truckload carrier NFI and instead focusing on become a provider of SaaS products targeted to brokers and carriers, the company rolled out a suite of five solutions that are mostly using machine learning to automate more decision-making and drive greater productivity out of brokerage operations (though its announcement also noted it can be utilized by carriers). There is no one name for the entire package as its five components all perform different functions.
There is one common theme in the individual components’ names: they all begin with “auto.” The five are AutoBid, AutoAccept, AutoSched, AutoBook and AutoValidate. The latter offering is the only one that is utilizing the capabilities of generative AI.
The Transfix announcement of the product disclosed its first customer: NFI, which bought the brokerage business.
In discussing the transition to a software provider, Salama said Transfix goes into a new line of business bolstered by what it learned as a digital brokerage. “There are a lot of pain points that we needed tech to optimize to give us a better ability to get insights from our data,” Salama said. The development of solutions in-house for those issues meant that “we were building those for ourselves, but now we’re talking to customers or brokers.”
Some of those companies Transfix is targeting as a customer have not thought about these issues for a long time, “but we’ve been thinking about them for ten years so it’s really exciting,” Salama said.
Source: freightwaves.com
