Shippers and brokers are traditionally forced to use off-the-shelf transportation management systems because they cannot afford to build their own TMS.
These systems come at a steep cost — despite the growing number of TMS solutions on the market, many fall drastically short of expectations and are prohibitively expensive.
What’s needed is a freight management solution that does it all, but is scalable and affordable — perhaps even free.
This is the goal of MVMNT, a Chicago-based FreightTech startup.
MVMNT founder and CEO Michael Colin drew from his logistics background and passion for fintech to create a freight management solution that addressed the many inefficiencies and pain points that hinder this industry.
“When booking a load, you’ve got your TMS open on one window, you’ve got your email open on another window, and then you’ve got a Chrome browser open with like 15 tabs,” Colin said.
In this emerging era of streamlined freight technology, using three monitors at once just isn’t the answer.
“It’s a transportation management system, right? You’re supposed to be able to manage all of your freight in it,” Colin explained. “You shouldn’t have to use external, individual subscription-based software solutions built 15 years ago to do your job.”
From carrier procurement to pricing, load dispatching to making payments, MVMNT is the all-in-one freight management platform that encapsulates what a TMS should be.
“We don’t charge for connections made on our platform,” he said. “We’re not in the business of making decisions for our customers; we’re just in the business of helping facilitate those decisions and making them quicker and more efficient.”
MVMNT’s free-to-use model takes capital constraints out of the equation when it comes to choosing freight management software.
“If you’re a small brokerage, not only do you have to think about making money but you also have to think about cash flow,” Colin said. “Transportation’s an industry where cash flow is incredibly important.”
Colin stressed that cash flow goes beyond the books — it can better position companies to make a direct impact in the market.
“Cash flow is not just an accounting function — by being able to pay your carriers quickly, you drive stronger retention, get better rates and are more competitive in the market,” said Colin. “Our QuickPay-embedded financing solution brings the benefits of paying carriers immediately to small and medium-sized businesses that otherwise wouldn’t be able to.”
He described MVMNT as unlike other free-to-use products, many of which sacrifice quality for accessibility.
“We really want to make sure that this isn’t true for our platform,” Colin said. “The ability to build something very strong that solves end users’ problems while also being free — I think that’s a really powerful combination.”
Colin founded MVMNT in response to the challenges he faced at a large freight brokerage in Chicago. As then-director of business operations, he was frustrated with a number of technology constraints that made things inefficient.
What MVMNT has created is a reverse-engineered TMS, dubbed TMS 2.0, one that Colin said he’d love to have used when he was in the trenches. The platform’s familiarity and simplicity among industry leaders has quickly led to its widespread adoption. In just two years, over 30,000 carriers have joined the platform.
“We’ve redefined what your TMS should be able to do and found a way to give it away for free to everyone in the market,” Colin said. “And unlike many startups trying to enter the space, we are building MVMNT from the inside out as industry operators that believe in a strong command of operations via technology.”