In Seattle, Convoy vets land $2.4M to tackle trucking analytics

The creators of Convoy, a Seattle-based marketplace for trucking services supported by Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates, were Ryan Soskin and David Tsai. In addition, Soskin managed carrier sales at Coyote Logistics, which UPS purchased for $1.8 billion. Tsai previously started a business that created mobile games. The company: GoodShip sells analytics software to shippers, assisting them in bringing together fragmented data from emails and spreadsheets pertaining to contracts, trucking performance statistics, price information, and more. Enhancing productivity, streamlining data analysis, and enabling "supply chain agility" are the goals, especially in times of choppy market conditions. Although it also creates software for airlines, it earns money from shippers. Five people work for GoodShip. Customers: Large producers and retailers with goods that need to be transported by trucks at the mid-market to enterprise level. Nicole Schuman, transportation procurement manager at Reser's Fine Foods, said in a statement: "Leveraging the platform, we've been able to access important information that was previously opaque." "To enable shippers and carriers to digitally procure, measure, and optimize contract business more easily and accurately than ever before." The Convoy "mafia" consists of a number of former Convoy employees that have founded their own Seattle firms, such as Outgo, Solo, Mystery, Common Room, and others. This group includes Soskin and Tsai. Along with Logixboard, Flexe, Shipium, and Pandion, it is one of a growing number of logistics and shipping technology businesses in Seattle.