Flock Freight sees growth in pooling rates, potential of future scale

In the volatile landscape of a soft freight market, Flock Freight has weathered the storms.

While the company has made tough decisions, including reevaluating the structure of its team to align with the dynamic demands of the market, leadership is looking forward to its transition in 2024 while harnessing the technological advancements it has made throughout 2023.

“Flock’s not immune to the market forces that everyone is facing. We are selling a differentiated platform and I think part of that challenge up to this point has been awareness and truly understanding what shared truckload represents,” Chief Operating Officer Chris Pickett told FreightWaves.

Pickett explained that while the company has pushed through this year’s market conditions, Flock Freight’s product, engineering and operations teams have focused on its Shared Truckload platform, “building thicker data sets which are ingested by increasingly sophisticated machine learning models which yield more accurate predictions which leads to more transactions.”

“Our pooling rates are 33% higher than they were when we began the year,” said Pickett. “This means that our success rate of finding freight that can be pooled has improved, leading to higher-quality service to both shippers and carriers.”

Recent strategic partnerships have aided the company’s ability to grow a greater pool of partial shipments. Flock Freight announced a multiyear integration partnership in September with transportation management system e2open, giving its shipper customers access to freight pooling technology.

“We see this as the beginning of a new frictionless era of pooling millions of shipments across TMS platforms,” Oren Zaslansky, founder and chief executive officer of Flock Freight, said about the partnership.

Flock Freight also integrates with Banyan Technology, Oracle and others, providing shippers that use these products another available mode to move their products.

With these integrations and the company’s focus on the capabilities of its proprietary technology, Pickett said Flock Freight’s technology is now hitting critical mass, enabling it to drive down costs for shippers and bring better utilization to its carrier network.

“Now, how do we make it easier for both the demand side of the marketplace and the supply side of the marketplace to connect? With our carrier base, our digital engagement playbook is all about making it easier for them to find and book attractive loads. But once we locate and confirm available capacity, we want to be able to offer higher-paying shared truckload options in addition to the same one-pick, one-drop full truckloads they can find on other platforms. So we are really diving deeper into both sides of the marketplace and continuing to tweak our service offerings while also making it easier to do business with us,” he said.

Along with improvements on its overall available pool for freight, Pickett’s team has been using the data behind these pools to enhance its pricing tools.

“Our pricing capabilities will adjust based on our freight in network. We can adjust our win rates around what rates were more likely to be declared by any given shipper. So we are constantly looking to build out core density, and if we see that we have a certain number of pools that are looking for a shipment with certain dimensions, across a specific geographic corridor, we can tune our pricing within that network.”

At the core of Flock Freight’s offering is a path to a more sustainable transportation industry.

“We have had more discussions with chief sustainability officers over the last year than the average freight intermediary. We will start to see the new California rule [SB 253] come into play and I suspect we are going to have much more dialogue with some of the larger companies and their CFOs as they start to get their arms around possible SEC reporting too. I think this is just another example of the world that is coming our way,” Chief Financial Officer Pat Dillon told FreightWaves.

After a tumultuous year, the Flock Freight team is optimistic about how its technology is advancing and the future needs of the industry when it comes to its mode offering.

“Shippers have embraced shared truckload as a proven mode alternative to traditional less-than-truckload and full truckload and carriers are increasingly looking to Flock to help maximize the weekly revenue potential of their fleets. The mission now becomes making it as easy as possible to connect and transact with zero friction for both sides of the marketplace,” Pickett said.