Uber Freight announces new tech offerings, reaches $20B in managed freight

Managed transportation provider Uber Freight announced Tuesday at its annual Deliver conference in Frisco, Texas, a number of new features available to customers and said the company’s freight under management has grown to $20 billion.

“The beauty of our network is that as we grow, the more we can drive our algorithms and planning optimization, bringing more savings back to our customers,” said Lior Ron, founder and CEO of Uber Freight. The company has saved over $1.5 billion in transportation costs for customers this past year, he added.

Ron told FreightWaves that Uber Freight has recently created its Design Partner Program, a collaboration among 40 shipping partners that work with companies to create the new transportation services and products that were unveiled at the conference.

“We do a full discovery workshop and interviews to co-create at all levels of our organization,” said Ron. “We even educate those partners on best practices so it’s not only about creating technology but infusing it properly into their organization. We see this as a precondition for success, and now it is a precondition for all innovation moving forward.”

Since last year’s Deliver conference, the company has focused on developing a customer transportation management system, combining its spot freight expertise with the managed freight operations it acquired in 2022 from legacy transportation provider Transplace.

Key enhancements include the Control Tower, which streamlines access to critical data, and an updated Tracking Portal for vendor integration. The Dock Scheduler looks to improve warehouse efficiency, while the redesigned Routing Guide offers data-driven insights for shipping costs and carrier management. Uber Freight has also simplified order entry, enhanced location data accuracy and refined financial management tools.

Uber Freight’s updated TMS. (Photo: Uber Freight)

“Module by module, we completely re-architected the TMS from the planning stage to the procurement stage and more. Being modular, you can pick and choose and utilize certain components as you go along and it is super user-friendly,” explained Ron.

He also detailed how over the past year, Uber Freight has managed more than 24 million loads across 6,000 brands, allowing it to leverage that shipment data to provide AI tools, including its new solution Insights AI, which was highlighted at the Frisco event.

Using insight from five of the largest shippers in Uber Freight’s Design Partner Program, the company’s new AI application can answer more than 2,000 questions with 92% accuracy, covering areas including freight spend analysis, contract utilization, average savings, and live- and drop-load operations analysis. This information is relayed to customers through a chat function, an updated KPI dashboard or a new proactive recommendation function in its updated TMS.

Uber Freight has also continued to improve on its procurement product Exchange, originally released in September 2023 as its contract-only platform was extended to its spot freight market at its last event in May. This created a single carrier and shipper portal to bid freight out of.

In May, the product had been rolled out to its full carrier network, with about 180 shippers transitioning to the new technology. On Tuesday, Uber Freight announced all shippers have access to the platform through its new TMS rollout, providing carrier scorecards, pricing tools and book-it-now features.

Lastly, the company announced it is now linking shippers with its parent company’s product Uber Direct, which leverages Uber’s driver network to move goods in under two hours. This enhances Uber Freight’s Parcel Transportation Management System, which has processed over 250 million packages in the past year, according to the company.

“Uber’s last-mile capabilities are moving super fast, and now is the time to start putting things together between the two companies to have customers optimize their last-mile network. They can help customers now move from store to customer, warehouse to customer, or even customer to customer,” said Ron.

He explained that Uber Freight hopes to deploy these technological advancements in Europe, Mexico and the cross-border market.