Project44 forms two new businesses, launches AI-native LSP44

In a strategic restructuring that reflects the fundamental differences between how shippers and logistics service providers buy technology, project44 announced today that it is separating into two focused businesses.

project44 will continue serving enterprise shippers as a decision intelligence platform, offering TMS, visibility, yard management and last-mile solutions. Meanwhile, LSP44 launches as a dedicated, profitable, AI-native infrastructure business built for logistics service providers.

“Shippers and LSPs don’t buy the same thing, so we stopped pretending one business could serve both,” said Jett McCandless, founder and CEO of both project44 and LSP44, in a news release sent to FreightWaves. “But here’s what most people forget: project44 didn’t start with shippers.

We started in 2014 serving the brokers, forwarders, and 3PLs who took the first bet on us. They built this network with us.” “LSP44 is us coming home –handing the LSP industry more than a decade of network, data and trust, now in the form of AI agents that act, not just observe.”

The split creates two distinct go-to-market engines, two product roadmaps and two dedicated organizations. But they all run on the shared spine of the largest AI-native agent network, carrier API infrastructure and logistics data graph on Earth.

The journey to two McCandless told FreightWaves in an interview that the decision to form two distinct businesses traces back to project44’s founding story. –And the realization that the company had strayed from its original customer base.

When project44 launched in 2014, the logistics industry still ran on phone calls, faxes and electronic data interchange (EDI). The company’s first product was real-time API connectivity across the entire logistics workflow: rate quote, dispatch, visibility and documentation for the less-than-truckload market.

Its first customers weren’t shippers, they were logistics service providers. Brokers, forwarders and 3PLs like Worldwide Express, BlueGrace and DSV were the companies that took the initial bet, plugged in the first integrations. That’s what helped build the infrastructure on which everything else now runs.

McCandless said that nine of the ten largest logistics service providers in the world now run on what will become LSP44 infrastructure. But as a venture-backed company seeking growth, project44 eventually expanded into the enterprise shipper market, building visibility applications and becoming the dominant player in that space.

The 2020 pandemic assisted this momentum, as COVID-19 created massive tailwinds for supply chain visibility. There was a problem, though: shippers and LSPs speak entirely different languages.

“Where a shipper says, ‘I want to improve my OTIF, I want to improve my working capital, I want to reduce my inventory’ –LSPs don’t talk like that,” McCandless explained. “They say, ‘I want to do more dispatches with fewer people. I want to find trucks at lower prices on transactional pricing.’”

The context-switching proved increasingly difficult for sales and customer success teams. As McCandless observed his teams in joint meetings, it became clear they weren’t well-equipped to serve both buyer personas simultaneously. “Rather than dilute the messaging to both, I said, why don’t we actually spin this out?” McCandless said.

Thus, LSP44 was born out of a desire to better serve both customer bases more efficiently. Tech deep dive: ‘Context’ vs. ‘guessing faster’ At the heart of LSP44’s value proposition is a pointed critique of the current AI landscape in logistics: agents without context aren’t worthwhile.

“AI agents without context are just guessing faster,” McCandless told FreightWaves Today on Monday. “Shippers have found that there’s a lot of work to try to create context so that those agents can actually be effective.”

While a new generation of venture-funded startups has rushed into logistics AI and raised capital, what they don’t all have is context or distribution. McCandless identified that the real value of agents comes from when they already know the carrier, the lane, the shipment, the exception and the customer before taking a single action.

LSP44’s agents arrive pre-loaded with operational context from the largest logistics data graph in the world: over 280,000 carriers, 1. 5 billion shipments and 706 million carrier events processed every day across North America, Europe, APAC and Latin America.

That context is the product –the result of over a decade and approximately $1 billion invested in infrastructure. But scale alone isn’t the differentiator. It’s the synchronous nature of the data. “We have the world’s largest logistics data graph,” McCandless said.

“More importantly than just being the largest logistics data graph, it’s actually the largest synchronous data graph also. Somebody out there would say, ‘Well, we have a really big data graph too.’ Yeah, it’s all in EDI, phone calls and email. By the time you get the signal or triggers, you don’t even