Above the Fold: Supply Chain Logistics News (July 17, 2026)

By Adrian Gonzalez

We’ve had a week of bad air quality days here in Boston (and elsewhere) due to Canadian wildfires.

I went for a bike ride anyway.

As I left my driveway, I cycled past my neighbors who were walking their dog. They were both wearing duck-billed N95 masks.

The sky was rust orange, the air had a burnt wood smell.

I waved to my neighbors and turned the corner.

Crazy.

—-

Here’s the supply chain and logistics news that caught my attention this week:

Back to the Future: The Launch of LSP44

The biggest news of the week — which seemed to dominate my LinkedIn feed for a couple of days — was project44’s announcement that it is separating into two focused businesses. project44 will serve enterprise shippers as a Decision Intelligence Platform, while the newly launched LSP44 will provide “purpose-built AI Agent and API Infrastructure” for logistics service providers.

I encourage you to read the long press release for all the details, and I haven’t been briefed yet by the company, but here is the excerpt I want to focus on today:

Why a dedicated organization of LSP44

For years, one product organization served two buyers (Shippers and LSP) who buy nothing alike. Unlike shippers who connect, see, act, and automate inside a platform built for them with distinct use cases, distinct personas, distinct sales cycles, LSPs invest in infrastructure [emphasis mine]. They embed it inside their own TMS, their own portals, under their own brand, and deliver it to their customers, whose end customers never see LSP44, only a better product and service from their logistics provider.

It’s absolutely true that shippers and logistics service providers are two very different types of buyers, with different IT needs and requirements. So, from that perspective alone, creating a separate business focused solely on LSPs makes sense.

When I started as an industry analyst more than 27 years ago, one of the most common complaints I heard from LSPs was that transportation management systems were designed primarily for shippers, not logistics providers. That’s one of the reasons many LSPs developed their own software during the 1990s and early 2000s.

Today, LSPs have a lot more options, with several leading software vendors providing solutions designed specifically for freight forwarders, customs brokers, and providers of managed transportation and warehousing services. Yet, many LSPs continue to develop their own applications, a decision driven primarily by two factors that are inherently linked:

IT as a Competitive Differentiator: Having the ability to offer customers different and more targeted and enhanced functionality than their competitors, such as better visibility and business intelligence tools. Here is how one LSP put it to me: If we and most of our competitors are using the same vendor’s transportation management system (TMS), then how can we differentiate if we’re all basically offering the same capabilities to customers?

Faster, More Responsive Innovation: Having full control of the innovation cycle versus being at the mercy of a software vendor’s release schedule. Simply put, when new functionality is required, either by a customer or an internal request, LSPs want to enable it as quickly as possible. In many cases, developing the functionality in-house is faster than submitting a new feature request to a third-party vendor and keeping your fingers crossed that it gets included in the next release, which could take six months or more.

So, while it’s not universally true that LSPs invest only in infrastructure — many, if not most, still procure software applications from third-party software vendors — it is, nonetheless, a differentiating value proposition.

What exactly is this “infrastructure”? The press release doesn’t provide a straightforward definition, but based on the announcement, I see it consisting of four foundational layers. First is connectivity: a network of APIs linking LSPs with carriers, ocean lines, LTL networks, and other trading partners, eliminating the need to build and maintain hundreds of individual integrations. Second is data: a logistics data graph containing shipment history, carrier performance, lane intelligence, rates, events, and ETAs that provides the operational context AI needs to make better decisions. Third is workflow: APIs that execute core logistics processes such as quoting, tendering, tracking, document generation, and carrier onboarding. Finally, LSP44 adds an AI layer, with agents capable of carrying out many of those workflows autonomously.

In short, LSP44 is being positioned as an AI-native infrastructure layer that combines connectivity, data, workflows, and autonomous agents into a foundation that LSPs can embed within their own technology platforms.

As the press release notes, when project44 was founded in 2014, “the company’s first product was a real-time API across the entire logistics workflow: rate quote, dispatch, visibility, and docs for the less-than-truckload market. Its first customers were logistics service providers…who helped build the infrastructure on which everything else now runs.”

It is why, I presume, the company chose @freightpipes as its Twitter (now X) handle.

The challenge, however, is that most organizations, especially shippers, don’t issue Requests for Proposals (RFPs) for APIs, connectivity, or other forms of “logistics plumbing.” They buy software applications such as TMS, WMS, YMS, and visibility platforms. Likewise, investors have historically valued software applications more highly than infrastructure. That helps explain why project44 expanded beyond connectivity into applications as it increasingly focused on the shipper market.

Today, I view project44 as a Supply Chain Operating Network (SCON) for shippers — a multi-enterprise platform that connects companies to share data, execute transactions, and coordinate processes across organizational boundaries.

LSP44 essentially carves out the “infrastructure” components of the SCON for LSPs that already have their own applications, either from third parties or internally developed.

In many ways, LSP44 represents a return to the company’s roots — back to “freightpipes.” The difference is that the market has changed. Connectivity, network effects, and logistics data are no longer viewed simply as plumbing beneath the application layer. Increasingly, they’re being recognized as strategic assets in their own right, especially in an era where AI is only as good as the data and context behind it.

Whether LSP44 succeeds or not, the announcement reflects a broader shift in enterprise software. As AI becomes more widely available, competitive advantage may come less from the AI itself and more from the data, network connectivity, and workflows that give it context.

And with that, I’m out of time.

Have a meaningful weekend!

Song of the Week: “Birds Fly (Whisper To A Scream)” by The Icicle Works