Ep. #79: Funding News - Genlogs Raises $60M

A carrier vanishes from the road, sells its MC, and reappears just long enough to “accept” a $3.8M server load. Sounds absurd—until you see how often the digital record diverges from real-world behavior. We sit down with Genlogs CEO Ryan Joyce to unpack their $60M Series B and the larger vision: an all-source intelligence platform that fuses roadside cameras, satellite imagery, IoT signals, open datasets, and financial clues into one reliable source of truth.

We walk through why data quality—not flashy demos—determines AI ROI in logistics. Ryan breaks down how Genlogs’ nationwide camera network establishes ground truth, then correlates it with other signals to expose mismatches: carriers that stop appearing on highways, fleets that claim 200 trucks online while their physical footprint stays flat, or flatbed operators suddenly “hauling” high-value electronics in dry vans across the country. These anomalies are the breadcrumbs that prevent theft and steer teams away from risky tenders. More importantly, the same signals power precision sourcing—finding the one carrier in the right city with the right equipment today—so you can stop blasting a hundred calls to cover one load.

The conversation expands beyond fraud. Ports use the platform to measure dwell at the gate, improve turn times, and identify BCOs draining cargo from neighboring gateways. Insurers, lenders, and truck sales and service centers get access to verifiable activity data that refines underwriting, targeting, and revenue planning. With fresh capital, Genlogs is sequencing a multi-product roadmap, expanding coverage into Mexico and Canada, and staying disciplined on spend to protect quality and customer trust.

If you care about accurate carrier validation, fewer costly mistakes, and sourcing that actually lands on the first or second call, this conversation offers a practical blueprint. 

Follow The Freight Pod and host Andrew Silver on LinkedIn.

Thanks to our sponsors:

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Cloneops.ai: Not just AI. Industry-born AI.

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Rapido Solutions Group: Nearshore solutions for logistics companies.

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GenLogs: Freight Intelligence on every carrier, shipper, and asset via a nationwide sensor network

https://www.genlogs.io/

Transcript

Sponsor Shoutouts & Setup

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Before we get started today, I want to give a quick shout out to our headline sponsor, Stute Technologies. Every week on this show, I talk to operators who are crushing it on the service side but still chasing down payments. That cash flow gap is brutal when you're trying to scale your business. That's why I wanted to tell you about Stute. Stute is the AI platform that does accounts receivable work instead of just assisting with it. Their CEO, Taric, actually came from TQL, so he gets how logistics companies operate. I've known him for years and I truly trust what he's building. What Stute does is simple. Their AI actually collects your receivables for you, not some software that just helps you chase the payments. It literally does the work. It's up and running in days, not months. As an example, Bishop Lifting is using Stute for a 35% reduction in overdue invoices, millions more in working capital, and a reduction of manual work by 50%. If you're tired of your AR eating up time and cash, check out stute.ai. That's s t-u-ut.ai. Tell them you heard about it on the freight pod. They'll get you collecting in days, not months, so you can focus on actually running your business. Now let's get this episode started. I'm your host, Andrew Silver, joined today by a special, per usual, but also unique repeat guest, uh, Mr. Ryan Joyce.

SPEAKER_00 1:37

Welcome to the show. How are you? It is great to be back. I'm doing really well, man. I I missed our last conversation, looked back on it fondly, was looking forward to coming back someday.

SPEAKER_01 1:46

And we get to do a little da da da da da breaking news. That's I I this I've only done breaking news a couple times, and I always mess up the sound. It's not I I accidentally do the Sports Center like top 10 sound instead of the that that that that that like breaking news sound. But uh we are breaking some news today, and I will let you do the honors. Um why are we here?

SPEAKER_00 2:07

Yeah, we're well, I wanted to share the news with you and others that Genlogs just raised a$60 million Series B uh that was led by Battery Ventures, uh, IVP, and a handful of other investors. But we are off to the races. Um, 2025 was a lot about making sure this could work. And now for us, 2026 and beyond, is all right, let's go big with what we're doing. And uh and we can get into the whole why and such, but yeah, that's the big news, man. Is um really excited to announce this week.$60 million Series B. Couldn't be more proud of the team.

SPEAKER_01 2:43

I love that. That's awesome. There's there's a lot of questions, and we'll get into the meat of it. But one of the reasons I think this is especially cool, and and I think I said this the last time we spoke, is I feel like Genlogs is one of the most unique businesses in our space. Like, I feel like a lot of what you hear of innovation in freight is often kind of like recycled stuff, or like what's the greatest and latest trend that we can all run and jump into and claim we're changing the world with. And it's just not what Gen Logs has ever been. Like when you first told me about Gen Logs, I remember exactly where I was. I was sitting in a Target parking lot charging my car. Uh I'm a Tesla guy. So I, you know, whatever. I was sitting in a charge target parking lot in Highland Park, Illinois, and you talked to me for half an hour about this business. And I was like, I've never heard of something like this. Like, this is actually very different and unique. And that was, I don't know, two years ago, maybe a year and a half ago. And it's just cool because like we're talking about real money now. I mean,$60 million, that is a lot of money, a lot of responsibility, a lot of accountability. Um, so I've got a bunch of questions. Let me start something simple. For for listeners who maybe didn't hear our first episode, let me first say go back and listen to it. Uh you'll learn a lot about this business, but just as interesting or more interesting, you'll learn about the man, Ryan Joyce, and kind of what a fascinating background you have. But for those that didn't listen to that yet, give us a quick, like high-level understanding of what is genlogs.

SPEAKER_00 4:17

Yeah, I used to say gen logs, we had built a nationwide network of roadside cameras that were collecting 24-7 on all trucks and commercial vehicles on the roads, and then using that to deliver visibility to our customers, whether they're freight brokers, shippers, insurance customers. Uh, and that's still true, but I think the real uh, if we go back in time, like for us, cameras were always just the beginning. And we knew that in order to kind of shed light on this industry and it do so in a way that you could get aggregate all the data in one place. Uh, we tried a bunch of different ways to get at this data, and we're like, it's just not going to work unless we build this nationwide network. And there were a lot of people that said, that's gonna be really difficult, it'll never work, all the above. And two years later, we have a nationwide network of cameras that are collecting this data. But I think what the way I would describe Genlog going forward, Series B and beyond, is truly a company that is now bringing in a whole bunch of different types of data points. In fact, we are now bringing in satellite imagery, uh, we're bringing in IoT devices, open source data sets, financial data sets, and it's all coming in into one large repository that our data science teams are now extracting really unique value and tying, correlating data across these different sensors with really our camera network providing that ground truth. That we know that a truck was at a place in time that allows us in other data sets to look at its patterns and activity and ultimately derive truth as to does this carrier say what they say they're gonna do? Uh, do they operate in the way that they're digitally claiming? And then allowing all other customers that are trying to work with trucking companies validate that these carriers are real, uh, that they can be trusted or not, and flagging when that is a problem, but doing so across all different types of sensors that are out there in the world, and really akin to like you you alluded to the first conversation we had, my background. It's very uh similar to the way the US intelligence community works. My background being at CIA, I've I worked uh in the intelligence community for almost two decades, really worked very closely with folks from uh outside and National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, National Reconnaissance Office, National Security Agency. All of those focus on different, they're called intelligence or INTS. So you have SIGIIN, signals intelligence, you have GeoINT, geospatial intelligence. Uh, we at GenLogs are mimicking what has made the US intelligence community so successful over, you know, certainly the last 70 years since World War II, but really going back 250 years since even George Washington had this first spy ring, and what they were able to bring all together, this data together, to make really informed analysis and decisions about what they should do next, to really give military leaders the White House. Like that's what the what the US intelligence community is super good at is taking data across different sources and bringing it together, known as all source intelligence analysis. We are doing that at Genlogs.

Intelligence Model For Freight Data

SPEAKER_01 7:20

So so many thoughts coming out of that. One, you have to be the first founder to ever make a callback to George Washington in uh their comparison to their business. Um, but that that aside, I I what I love is you hear so much about AI today, and it's the coolest, latest, and greatest, and it's what everybody has to have. But as we're now kind of a year to two years into this being the centerfold of the industry, we're starting to see the ramifications of good versus bad. And the central point that kind of is a driver of whether you lead to good outcomes or bad is data. That is what has become like the most central learning lesson from the AI experience is that data data is king. And if you have great data, you have undoubtedly better outcomes with whatever you're trying to build with your AI tools. If you have bad data, the AI, AI can't do anything for you. And so it's really interesting to me that like your business started certainly as a a data business through the lens of cameras, like physical cameras out on the roads. And that alone was unique. It sounds like the evolution of the business has been to kind of leverage your experience and and be akin to the kind of US intelligence uh realm. Um where it's now how do we like uh expand our our the data, the data availability we have and and recognize that you are a data company. And if you can be the king of data in this industry, what you could do from there is who knows? I mean, it it's the the opportunities seemingly are endless. Um, so I think that's kind of one of the more fascinating takeaways for me when I think about the evolution of your business. Does that make sense?

SPEAKER_00 9:24

It totally does. I couldn't agree more. And really, our data and analytics team is the foundation of what we're doing here at Genlogs. And they often refer to that concept of a foundation that I look back at this last year of growth that we've had, and I'm very proud of it, but I'm also kind of cringe of the fact that people are buying the product in its early state and knowing that like we were still building this plane in flight, and that we're building this such incredibly firm foundation of data. And I think like later this week I'll be posting some behind-the-scenes videos of what we're doing at Genlog from our cameras uh perspective. Like, what are they seeing on the roads and the data that they're capturing, the ability to look at like a double pump, a roll uh roll door versus a sliding doors and versus all of these types of features of trucks and capturing that in real time on the roads in order to give deeper understanding of it's not just a carrier was there, but like what exactly is this carrier's equipment? And so that I can really reach out and find what I need to do, like a sniper rifle and not a shotgun approach. And that shotgun approach, I think, like uh has really hit me over this last year when it comes to AI. I think, you know, our mutual friend Ryan Schreiber from Metafora just posted the other day uh saying, like, hey, he's hearing through the grapevine from some very large brokerages out there that they're actually not realizing the ROI that they hoped when it came to some of these AI companies. And I saw a demo of one of these companies where they were blasting out calls to a hundred different carriers to cover one load. And it's really, it sounds, it looks awesome, it sounds awesome. You see all these calls simultaneously going on. But the reality is that uh they're charging about 20 cents per minute for each one of those calls. And so, and I was looking at how long those calls were taking, and it was about four to five minutes. So 20 cents times five minutes, it's a dollar per call. They did a hundred of these to cover one load. I mean, I never was a broker, but I, you know, going back to the mobile.

SPEAKER_01 11:24

The math does not math.

SPEAKER_00 11:26

The math doesn't math. If you're paying$100 to cover one load, you are not gonna, you're just not gonna make it.

SPEAKER_01 11:32

And uh well, plus you're just paying$100 for one tool as a function of covering the load. That's that's not your total cost to cover the load. You got it.

SPEAKER_00 11:41

Separate point. And so the what we're really trying to do at Gen Logs is give every one of our customers the ability to find exactly what they are looking for in that first or second uh shot. Whether they want to pick up the phone and call a carrier that they know a carrier is in Dallas right now, they have the right type of uh flatbed or open deck to get a load move that they likely need to get back to Chicago, wherever it might be, and that they could prioritize or waterfall, whether it's a human or AI. I don't really care what happens at that point. I want to give them the best data to make the best action or decision or whatever it might be. That's really Genlog's DNA when it comes to that intelligence piece. We give you the intelligence so that you can make the best next decision, action, whatever it might be.

Data Quality, AI ROI & Targeted Sourcing

SPEAKER_01 12:31

So the the other piece I wanted to bring up, just in that that it was a thought that resonated in in hearing you explain what Gen Logs is, and and this is more topical, is fraud prevention. So I think one of the I think the two companies that maybe have stood to gain the most in the last two to three years as a result of the rise in fraud in freight and logistics, which the rise is like insane. Those two companies are highway and gen logs, are the two that I think have have like most clearly stood out as well, how do we deal with this fraud? Let's talk to these companies. So I'm curious, like how like when you think about the Gen Log's value proposition to your customer base, how much of it is fraud related versus other solutions? Like, you know, fraud is the topic of the day, the month, the year, uh, right beside AI. Um, so it is very front and center, and it seems to be where um the most headlines show up for you guys because, you know, okay, lobster,$400,000 of lobster stolen. And you could be like, well, I saw the truck here uh in New England the other day. So I'm just curious, can you talk about that for a little bit?

Fraud Surge And MC Reselling

SPEAKER_00 13:49

Yeah, I sure can. Well, first let me just say that I truly have deep respect for what Highway Jordan over there has built, Michael Caney and the rest. I mean, they've they have built an incredible company that has served customers really well. So um that that should not never be taken away from them. Uh, and and really they've led the charge, I think, in the industry. They've frankly like illuminated the fact that, hey, this is a growing and bigger issue, and we should do something about it. And in many respects, Gen Logs has been able to ride on those, the coattails of what they've been able to do. I think, you know, what's really interesting is uh back in November of 24, in fact, I think it's right when you and I had our first recording for the podcast, we announced that week at Genlogs that we were going to investigate all stolen and missing equipment for the entire industry for free. And that includes stolen loads as well. And since then, we've actually delivered on that. Uh, we've done over 500 investigations at this point, completely free. So you can go to our website right now, upper right hand corner, there's a button that says find lost assets. You hit the button, you reach out, we investigate it, and we don't charge you. What it has allowed us to do is to get a really uh clear insight into how have those, how have these fraud trends changed over time and where are they today, where are they going? And what I'll tell you is that over the last uh two years that we've done this investigation, unfortunately about 90% and now skewing almost to near 100% of the investigations we do, certainly in recent months, have been from what's known as the sold motor carrier number for you know, fraudulent activity. And where a real legitimate motor carrier that has onboarded, whether it's through highway, RMIS, or others in the past, all everything looked good. They're green checks across the board. They hit hard times and they go out of business. And as kind of a last-ditch effort to recover some of the operating expenses or you know, go out, you know, pay their way out of bankruptcy or whatever, they go to a Facebook telephone telegram group and they sell their motor carrier number to you know 20,000, 30,000. Well, a lot of times now the buyers, who are the bad guys, by the way, like there's very little one of these MCs that are changing hands from like a good operator to a good operator, even if they're not stealing. They they got kicked out of Amazon relays program and they're just trying to get back in at that freight. So it's it's never like a good thing for the most part, but they'll sell it out there. The buyer will actually say, I'll buy it for 30,000, but I require the email and I require that the cell phone, the business number that you've been using these last you know, two or three years you operated. Because that's that's where they can make their real money on the theft. Well, it's the it's hugely problematic because now they can bypass two-factor authentication on a lot of those apps where they get the cell phone ping, what's the pin? Boom, I got it. And exactly the email now hasn't changed. It doesn't need to be updated on FMCSA. It's the same one that's always been. That's really difficult to defend against if you are solely uh operating in a digital world. Fortunately, gen logs came about at a time when we were now watching what's happening in the physical world. And is the digital and physical world in harmony? And what we're finding in almost every one of those cases is it's not. In fact, just the other day I posted a blog post now on LinkedIn about a$3.8 million load of servers that were stolen. And when uh when we looked at the carrier that this broker had met on a load board, tendered the load to, we looked at that carrier in our system. We saw them operating a year ago. We saw them operating six months ago, but it was 90 days ago that they disappeared from the roads, like completely. And we look back in time, you see them on the roads every single day, uh, and then all of a sudden, boom, they're gone. They disappeared from the roads 30 days before that MC was sold on Facebook, and 54 days before that load was tendered of$3.8 million to this carrier that no longer was actually operating out on the roads. And that's where I think the digital and physical bridge can be now bridged or that divide can be bridged. And that's where Genlogs brings a unique perspective. And it doesn't take away from what highway, RMIS, and others are doing. In fact, a lot of our customers have both together, but we're able to stop uh the theft by saying they're gone. And and I'll close, Andrew, by just saying you asked, like, is it fraud or is it sourcing, or like, where is Genlog seeing? And I always say those are two sides of the same coin. Why did you post on the load board originally and go with a new carrier that you've never worked with before? Is because of all of the carriers that you either have worked with or could be working with, you don't know where they are now. And you don't want to blast out emails to everyone to serve them potentially loads that don't actually matter to them or aren't relevant to them. So what we often talk through folks is like, hey, we'll help you stop fraud, but why don't we help you build out your carrier, uh onboarded carriers with really great carriers that are operating the lanes you need to service, and we'll let you know exactly where they are and what they might need. So you can now do outbound carrier sales the way people have always wanted to and intended to do it, and we'll help you avoid even having to get to the point that you're posting on load boards uh, you know, a thousand times a day. So that's my answer to that question. Hold up.

SPEAKER_01 19:08

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SPEAKER_00 21:06

Well, like aside, yeah, it got even worse. Where um, I mean, and I'm not making this up. This was the Southwest Transportation Security Council that that put out this be on the lookout for this. When we actually looked at what this carrier was running on the roads, they were running solely like flatbeds of wood for the entire time they were out there. Like we see the equipment, and it's marked in there as like flatbeds, and it was a multi-day load that would have been going from California to Columbus, Ohio. You know, just like you keep going, like it gets worse as you look into this. It's like, hey, they disappeared from the roads when they were operating, they had just a handful of trucks, flatbeds all the time operating in uh west of the Rockies. Now they're all of a sudden trying to run uh a drive in of$3.8 million of servers over to Columbus, Ohio. A lot didn't make sense. And like every single time that we investigate these stolen loads that people report to us, these red flags were there. People either chose to ignore them or they didn't have the technology to help them identify them in the first place.

SPEAKER_01 22:06

What's interesting to me is like you you described that as it gets worse. But as I was thinking about this through the lens of your business, all I can think of is it gets better. Because it's so interesting to me how as a result of this kind of um connection you have to the physical world with the cameras literally seeing all of these highways, the action that's taking place on them. These additional data points that show up, they just have never been considered before as trackable things to represent red flags. Your your ability as a result of having the cameras and having the infrastructure you've developed, your ability to define or build red flags is just not something that's existed before. Like to be able to point out they were operating on the road every day for months or years, and then one day stopped, and then there was no activity for 30 days. Like that is really insightful information that I never would have known in the past. Like there wasn't there would never be a way for me as I'm evaluating a carrier to understand that as a as as like a reality and then a red flag, because it's a simple question thereafter of what was going on during that month. Yeah. And like there's so much more you can do as a result of the infrastructure you've developed. And so I guess one of the things I'm curious about is what does it look like inside the Genlogs organization to determine what red flags are, right? Because there's so much data sitting in front of you. That's not like necessarily common knowledge to think about, like, oh, interesting. Like we've tracked this truck every day on the road, and then it was off the road for two weeks. Like, what should we make of that? Is that information that's interesting to us? And then how do we determine something as a result of that or take action as a result? So I'm just curious like what that world looks like inside gen logs.

Digital vs Physical Footprints

SPEAKER_00 24:11

Yeah. Um, I love this question. I'll tell you why. Is when I was getting ready to leave CIA, we were in the era of what we called ubiquitous technical surveillance, meaning a lot of the tradecraft that the CIA had used in decades in the past, during the Cold War, the old sticks and bricks of like putting down black caches and doing these meetings and you know dark places and this and that, all of a sudden, when you actually take it from a ubiquitous technical surveillance, meaning there's cameras, there's cell phone coverage, there's all of this. You now, like if you drop off the map for you know five or six hours because you're trying to do an operational act, that in and of itself could be strange. So think about you're sitting there on your phone, like all of us touch our phones all the day. All you know, every day, we're constantly on it. And all of a sudden, if your phone is not touched for five or six hours, that could be a signal to a foreign intelligence service that, hey, Ryan might be up to something there. And so that's like the great background that we came into this. Like some of my co-founders have similar backgrounds and other employees. We have Green Berets that were doing like really sensitive missions everywhere. We have other CIA guys, uh, you know, a purple heart recipient on the team. Like they had to operate in these environments where they were under the lens of all of this surveillance, and yet they still had to get uh the job done, or they had to be smart not to do a job that was definitely gonna pay. So take that into what we're doing here at GenLogs. And what we're essentially saying is what is what is the activity of every truck that's on the roads and every carrier that's on the roads? And then now looking from a core cohort perspective, what starts to stand out as, hey, they either dropped, same like, you know, I'm using my cell phone every day, now I'm no longer using my cell phone, that's anomalous. Well, if you're on the roads every day and then you're not anymore, that's anomalous. But you know, there are smaller carriers that run these like, you know, stranger lanes that we might not see on a regular basis. And we don't want to like penalize them if they pop up every third day where we're like, hey, they haven't been seen for third days. Oh, okay, they are again. Well, we can now look at like what is their normal pattern and then what would start to look strange for them. Like if we see them every third day, but now we don't see them for nine days, maybe that's a problem. And I'll give you another great example. The other day is uh a broker came to us and said, Hey, one of the things we're concerned about is when carriers start to really shift with the FMCSA how many trucks they're claiming to have in their fleet. And what we're realizing is they're claiming more trucks during certain periods when they've had some issues with out-of-service scores or crashes or whatnot, because they know that the way that the FMCSA works when it comes to its safer and basic scores is they do cohort analysis. So if they had a crash, if you have one crash with two trucks, that's bad. But one crash with 200 trucks, it's not as bad. Like the ratio works. So if you had a crash and all of a sudden you say, Well, we had 200 trucks, you season that for a month, and then all of a sudden, like you roll back down to 100, back down to two, like you can actually get away without your basic scores or CSA scores looking as bad. Well, what's really cool is because we have our sensors out on the roads, we can look at like, is the physical footprint trending up or down? Because it's it it may be that you leased 10 trucks onto your fleet. And we don't want to harm you if all of a sudden you did add 10 trucks in that you leased on because business is expanding. Well, we should see 10 additional trucks start to pop out there that are running regularly with you. But if we see you consistent on the roads, but you're claiming digitally that oh, we have 200 trucks, now just a hundred, 500 trucks and this and that, and that change in the digital world is not matching the physical world, boom, we can now flag that as anomalous or a red flag. So it's really taking like all of these data points together and letting the data science speak for itself is helping us really tune in what is what we should be looking at. And it really helps from uh, if you think about how AI works, it's all about having training data. Once we know what theft looks like, and we've investigated 500 of these, we can now train a model on hey, this always led to theft, this led to theft. Now start to flag when those same uh signals that a human might miss is now being seen across all of those data sets.

SPEAKER_01 28:30

Yeah, a couple of interesting thoughts I had coming out of that. One, hearing you talk about the FMCSA and the way that even they struggled to effectively measure some levels of quality because of the lack of connection to the physical world, um, as much as just trusting, like, oh, okay, you have 10 trucks registered, one accident, okay, there's the math. Um I think that's interesting. And I'm I'm almost curious if there's a potential commercial opportunity there between Gen Logs and and the FMCSA to become a deeper partner there and and you know, uh offer some support there or a way for them to get better tracking tools. Um and then the other thing I was thinking about was you know, uh a way in which carriers could partner with Gen Logs or become like preferred Gen Logs carriers where they essentially commit their, or not commit, but like provide their business strategy and like said, like, hey, this is who we are. We do have 20 trucks. Uh our top customers are these customers, and this is how we think about our business. And almost like if it was like a portal that they could go into gen logs and be like, this is who we are. And then like either the physical footprint aligns with that or it doesn't. And that makes them like a Genlog's top carrier or proof carrier, um, a way to let them kind of become a part of the solution. I don't know, just things I'm I'm thinking about as I as I listen to you explain this.

Red Flags And Anomaly Detection

SPEAKER_00 30:00

Look, it's as if you've been sitting in our product roadmap meetings. Um, so put a pin in that because I there's definitely a there. And uh, you know, you go back to that$3.8 million load, and you were like, why would they ever tender that out on the load boards? And I agree with you there. But you'd also want to know that whoever you worked with, even if they were a carrier you would work with a month ago, that they're still legitimate, that everything's like still good to go before you give them a$3.8 million load. And and that's exactly where we will be going is allowing carriers to essentially work directly with us to validate that they are who they say they are, that their digital footprint meets their physical footprint, so that they can get access to more and better loads across the board. And look, we never want to uh I never want to undermine a carrier when it comes to their their business, their um what they believe there is their competitive advantage when it comes to certain lanes out there. This is why like we uh we collect on the middle mile, we do some really fancy data science work when it comes to like what were they hauling, where might have they been going, but at the end of the day, we get asked often like, can you tell me for sure that that dry van was loaded or not? And we can make really good hypotheses of that, but we're not at the point now, like the uh Italian job where we can look at like, you know, what's the the distance between the brakes and the yeah, the yeah, it just it doesn't exist. See if there's weight on the on the trailer. Yeah. And so at the end of the day, like the the carriers know their own their own information. We're making inferences, we want to be there to help them. I'll kind of go back to what you said about FMCSA, and there's other government entities out there that I believe we can and will help over time. And um, and I've been asked before, like, okay, if you were to solve this fraud thing, doesn't that undermine your core commercial business? My answer is like, look, it'll unfortunately never be solved. There will always be a count and mouse game. But I if we could solve it, I would. And I believe it's just fundamentally good for America if we have more efficient and safer supply chains across the board. And if Gen Logs at the end of the day uh doesn't have the bigger exit it could have because we solved fraud and people didn't need to buy highway and RMS or Gen Logs anymore, then like that is a win for America, and I will be on board with that. I also think we just offer so much more to brokerages. They will often come to us when it starts with a theft or they're looking into fraud, and then they see like how crazy we can help them when it comes to carrier sourcing, shipper intelligence and prospecting, and some uh additional capabilities we're bringing online soon with regards to market intelligence and what density looks like in markets or capacity. So, this is all that that customers benefit from that goes beyond fraud and theft. So, if that whole issue ever went away, gen logs would still be in a great place to help each customer in the industry.

SPEAKER_01 32:57

Yeah, and and I'm gonna lie, it's not going anywhere. You can tackle one piece of it and solve a part of it. Um, and what that does is just give them something new to focus on and try to figure out. So um let's talk about the raise 60 million bucks. Um, what what does this allow Genlogs to do that simply wasn't possible before? And and I want to avoid like we're gonna hire more now, we're gonna invest in our growth. You know, like I won't like really understand like you know, you why why$60 million? Why that number versus others? And then what can we do now that we couldn't do before?

Ports, Dwell, And Shipper Intelligence

SPEAKER_00 33:33

Yeah. So the the answer is uh when when Genlog started and we were still figuring this industry out. Like keep in mind, I didn't come from this industry, I had to learn it, and my neither did my co-founders. In fact, it wasn't until like higher number six or seven that we actually had someone that had industry experience. So we had a hypothesis, and we were simply going to build and replicate the intelligence community in this space. We also, early on, I made a policy internally that said, look, we are gonna build one platform that will serve many verticals. And that started to expand from just freight brokerages, which was initial, initially who we were helping, to then now commercial auto insurance. Then it became government. We have federal and state and local law enforcement using our platform to crack down on things like cargo theft, but also human trafficking and narcotics trafficking. We're trying to help clean the industry up so that the good guys can flourish. And but it was always aligned that we were going to service many verticals via this one platform. But then we added some ports on uh there. We like ported Jacksonville as a user uh of the platform. And it started to see that there was like a now friction where we were being pulled in a few directions, and we were inevitably going to have to morph into a multi-product for a multi-vertical company. And we looked at like how did others do this well? How did Rippling or Figma or some of those that are outside of the industry that built multiple products under the same company name that could service customers in different ways? How did they do it? And we just realized that we weren't gonna be able to do that with the current footprint we had as a company, that we were getting competing uh requests and we were having to prioritize these roadmaps and all of that. And we said, look, we're gonna need more data science help, we're gonna need more engineering, and we're gonna need more product. Uh and so that uh that really was the catalyst for us to start to think about how do we help, like how do we build a killer product that um that services ports all across America and is the best product in that category for ports, while also supporting freight brokerages across America and being the best category leader there. We weren't going to be able to do it with the uh the current amount of capital that we had, even though we had been really capital efficient up to that point. We just saw that, like, hey, we we could try to go for it, but it could be a risk where we could kind of bottom out before we became cash flow positive. So that was a big catalyst for it. The other part of this was we were getting requests for geographic expansion. Um, I would get messages once a week coming in from whether it's freight brokerages or shippers in Canada saying, hey, we love what you're doing in the US. Are you guys doing it here yet? Are you doing it here yet? Same thing in Mexico. Um, and I've had repeated conversations with your brother Matt about like, hey, are we gonna collect this data so that we can help a little bit shed light cross-border? And we just couldn't do that with the current footprint uh that we had from a sensor deployment perspective. So that also, like, there was some more RD we needed to do. Telecommunications networks aren't great down in Mexico. And so we're like, all right, if we're gonna expand the product, we're gonna expand uh categories and different products, we're gonna expand geography, um, then then we're gonna need some capital. And finally, it was simply like uh the other part about this was every week we were seeing these thefts happening, and when we were reaching out, or they would reach out to us, they say, like, I hadn't heard about you guys until um until someone said, Hey, if you had something stolen, go talk to Genloc's. And like, we're still, I'm still uh maybe shocked and amazed, and maybe that's a good thing, that two years later, a lot of this industry has still not heard of us. They don't know we exist, they don't know we can help. Uh we have solutions that could immediately either find what's been stolen or crack down. And and I and I recognize that we hadn't invested in marketing or any outbound sales motion at all. Um, with really just two AEs last year, we essentially went from like zero to 10 figures of revenue in in a year with just two people that would handle the inbound. And we were like, there's a lot more to um to get out the door. Uh and so I think I said that zero to eight figures, yeah, uh of revenue there. And so that was um that that kind of culminated in that third reason to raise was we're gonna need to bring in some marketing folks, we're gonna need to bring in some outbound um folks to to get the word out on gen logs if we're gonna try to help this industry to the degree that we want to. And that caused us to say, how much would that that take? Um, we had some estimates about where we thought we would be comfortable, and then um and then we went out to market, and the market kind of said, like, hey, we we and we weren't planning to raise as much, I'll tell you that. But it was really favorable. We had had a uh a great Q3, and uh investors were saying, we want in, but we want in in a bigger way. So what can we do? And that ultimately led us to this conclusion.

SPEAKER_01 38:24

I appreciate the thorough response there. I think it's there's there's a lot of insight there. First question, I guess, is um port operators. I didn't realize were uh were a good vertical for you to pursue. Can you talk a little bit about where the value is for them in in all of this?

SPEAKER_00 38:42

Yeah, it depends on how the port is set up, but a lot of them are like tenant port operators or others that uh, you know, they sit there and they are um there's you know, ships pulling in, containers coming in and out, and they don't have a really good sense of where those containers go in order to understand where there may be other opportunities for them to reach out to large shippers or BCOs and say, like, hey, uh we see that you're bringing in uh equipment or whatever it might be into these other ports. Um, have you ever thought about using us? And here's how we could help you. And so there's kind of two facets to this. Um, number one is a lot of ports still don't have a great handle on, hey, how long are these containers sitting inside or outside the ports and the chassis and the what are the truck dwell times and all of that? We can put our cameras right at the gates and we can track all that. So we can give you kind of a rolling average for how long the dwell times of trucks are in the inside, how much those containers and chassis are on the outside, and how can you become more efficient to make it a more favorable port for people to transact with you? Then we can go out with our other data and say, hey, we're observing uh these uh BCOs receiving the actual containers and equipment in your area. And it's coming in through neighboring ports, and then they're actually draining that uh right into your back door. Why aren't they bringing it in through you? And we're so we're giving that that deeper shipper intelligence that allows uh port operators to go out there, knock on the door, and say, hey, instead of bringing it in through this other port, we could save you some money if you bring it in through here. And here's how our efficiency has gotten better over time.

SPEAKER_01 40:22

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Why Raise $60M And How To Use It

SPEAKER_00 41:56

Yeah, the risk right up front is that you think you have a ton of cash there and you need to spend it all right away. Uh, and that is uh fundamentally not what we're gonna be doing at Gen Logs. Um, we just put out a teaser video or announcing our Series B today. Um I saw some other slick videos in the past, and I reached out to those founders and said, like, hey, how much did that cost you? And some of those were like, Yeah, it cost us 100,000, cost us, you know, 120,000. Um, we got this done for like, you know, less than 3,000 bucks or whatnot. It was like, we're just not gonna spend that money there. And um we have a great VP of finance, Matt, and I ask him every week to report to the team how much money we have on our account, not rounded, not, hey, we have you know X millions of dollars. I want it to be like we have blank blank million four hundred and thirty-two thousand three hundred and thirty-three dollars. Because to us, every dollar counts. And that's how we are truly like uh building this company is we were thinking like really thoughtfully about every hire we are gonna make and every dollar we're gonna deploy to make sure that we are still here a generation from now. And that's the you know, I think for us, we the series B was really the change for us where after our series A, someone could have come in and offered us like a pretty attractive acquisition offer. We would have had to have heard of them out, and if it was really compelling, we might have taken it. Series B is an admission within the team that we are now on the track to IPO someday. Um and that's how we're gonna build our company is to be here seven, 10, 20 years from now and beyond and do this the right way early on. So I think the biggest risk is any company that's just raised a large round is they start to just spend, like, like all of a sudden, oh, we have this money and it's bottomless. Um, and that's how it goes. We are we are definitely not gonna go that route. The other thing uh that is related to that is we're not gonna boil the ocean. Like we want to do more, but we're gonna have to do more in a sequence. That if we try to do everything all at once, the quality is inevitably going to degrade. And I think I'm most proud of. Yes, we help customers, and yes, we've had great growth. But when customers look at genlogs versus some of their other vendors, they're like, You guys, uh, you guys are the most attentive to us. You guys respond to our requests, the quality is high, and it the product actually does what you said it was going to do. And I never want that to change. And that won't change if we're really methodically uh focused and maniacally focused on customers.

SPEAKER_01 44:25

Yeah, I appreciate that. How many, uh just quickly, how many investors would you say you met with over the last throughout the process as you were looking at this?

SPEAKER_00 44:34

When in our seed round, which uh closed back in December of 2023. So that was two years ago, I met with 100 investors before one said, I'll take a flyer on you guys. I I think it was a huge executional risk there. Not that I blame them. I think some people didn't understand what we were trying to do, where this could come. So 100 investors uh said, yep, like we're not gonna do it. Our series A was a little bit uh better for us because we had proven out that we could execute, we could get these sensors out. We had some early wins when it came to some uh flagship customers. And uh and that ended up being like, you know, let's call it 20 different uh investors that we met with, and then we were able to close that. This series B uh was such that we had started to get some heavy investor inbound, some preemptive offers that were actually just giving us term sheets and we were saying, nope, we're not ready, we're not ready. When we were finally ready, uh we uh opened it up to a select few. And if there's an investor listening to this and wondering, like, hey, why didn't I get invited? I I only invited the investors that had done really deep market due diligence first and came to me with their results. And I did that for two reasons. Number one, it was incredibly helpful to us. They were looking at the competitive landscape, they were interviewing a dozen of our customers and giving us the exact like feedback. They would, they would abstract out who said it, but we'd at least get the feedback, good, bad, or otherwise. And it showed us some of the blind spots that we needed to be working on. But number two, it showed us that they were really focused and understood this space. And they were willing to put that. It's not cheap to get a dozen of these uh interviews done, put together these huge hundred-page packets sometimes, and they would just email it to me out of the blue saying, Hey, we did all this work, hopefully it's helpful to you. And if if you if you could just spare us 30 minutes of time, I'd love to have a conversation. I took every one of those conversations where they had done the work up front. What that led to is that when we finally decided we were gonna uh raise this round, I built the data room, I released it uh on a Monday, and 13 days later we had a signed term sheet. So it was a really truncated Series B round because all I did was invite those that had done the work. They already had the conviction, they'd done the due diligence. Now they just needed to see our books, chat with some of the team, talk about what our vision was, and then they could uh arrive at that final conclusion. So it was less than two weeks from this round. I would say it was about 10 investors this time. And uh, and man, it was it was stressful, but way better than a hundred investors over the course of four months just telling you no and no over and again in your face.

Multi-Vertical Strategy & Expansion

SPEAKER_01 47:08

Yeah. So I mean, clear I think it just speaks to the quality of what you've built in the market. You say you haven't spent a dollar on marketing. Or you didn't say that, but you said you haven't spent much emphasis on marketing to date. Um but clearly something's working, because I that's not necessarily representative of what it typically looks like, where investors are doing that much work on the front end just to get in front of you. And and I appreciate how how thoughtful you were about who to include in the process. I think that's really insightful. Um but I do think you've got to be a really unique or interesting business that that these investors are doing that much front-end work just to get time on your calendar. So I congratulations and kudos to you guys for that. The question I have in the conversations you had with these investors, I'm just curious from a market standpoint, like what did you notice? Were there any trends in terms of what these folks are looking for right now or what they think is interesting, or what what they're seeing in the market that's that you just found interesting?

SPEAKER_00 48:13

Yeah, you know, I think the the what really stood out to me during this process was for an investor to move forward with the term sheet with us, they had to be convinced that Genlogs could be bigger than just the logistics industry or logistics service providers. That, you know, now that we've signed, I don't know, like uh more than half of the top 10 freight brokerages out there, four out of the top five, um, we're kind of working our way down that top 100 list and signing them up, getting them the data into their hands. Uh, and then some of the largest carriers out there, like Werner, NFI, and others, uh, there isn't like an infinite amount of white space out there. We can do more for these customers, but when you kind of sign the bigger customers, the only way that you get to a multi or you know, tens of billions of dollars outcome here is if your data can service more than just these, those customers. And so um so therefore it was really helpful for me as part of this exercise. I sat down and through the help of like some Chat GPT and otherwise, I said, like, let's investigate every single industry out there and potential customer that uses truck specific or truck adjacent data today. So get out of LSPs, uh, logistic service providers, going into like who actually uh some of the tire manufacturers, trailer manufacturers, the truck sales and service centers. Um, you know, double-clicking on that for a second, I have a friend that works at a sale and service center. For every truck that they add to their uh as that they're providing service for in a year, it's about$40,000 of additional revenue. So they sign a you know 100 truck fleet, that's another$4 million of revenue for that truck sales and service centers. They just they have the same issue that brokers do. Who's literally driving right in front of my service center every single day? I don't know. And so for us to be able to give them a way to target who's really operating within 300 miles often of their truck sales and service center, that could be a lot of revenue for them. So that was another example. We just kept building this out. Um, financial institutions, uh, uh, you know, lenders, all of this that might be interested in underwriting. The total amount of spend, actual average annual spend that that occurs now among all of these, it's about$50 billion. When you add it all up. And we said, wow, I think Genlogs could take all of that over time in terms of the data that we would have and the ability to serve it up to these customers, it would be better data than what they're using right now, I guarantee it. And so that became the that what we're kind of striving for in the future is solving problems for lots of industries to slowly over time take$50 billion or the lion's share of$50 billion of spend that's occurring on truck specific or truck adjacent data.

SPEAKER_01 51:01

Yeah, that's interesting. I really appreciate that. That's uh that's a fun problem to start to think about, too, of like what's adjacent here. And and the connection, I bet it's one of those things where it's hard to think of at first, and then as soon as you think of it, you're like, wait a second, that makes so much sense, right? Like insurance companies, I mean, like the truck and like reliance partners, companies like that, you call them and like all of a sudden you have this perfect lead system for them. Um just really interesting.

SPEAKER_00 51:29

But it's been really critical. What I would say is to say no. I talked about that sequencing. Like I it's every week I get a few hedge funds reach out to us. Hey, can we buy your data? Can we buy your data? And like it's really uh tempting to be distracted and say, like, sure, like what can we you know, hatch and this and that. And we've just have to be maniacal about saying no, no, like we'll get there someday, we'll get there someday. But this is what we have to do right now. Like, we have to honor the customers we have before going after the new customers. We'll get there. And we're you know building a huge network and a bigger moat and all this data to make sure no one else is gonna get there before us. But it's all been about saying no in order to give big yeses to the right customers.

SPEAKER_01 52:09

Yeah. So last question here as we wrap up. Um when you look back on this ray, this series B, say three to five years from now, what needs to be true for you to say it was like absolutely the right move?

Investor Process And Market Signals

SPEAKER_00 52:24

Yeah. Well, certainly we need to have moved in, like the we take the three reasons why we raise this. Like geographically, we need to be throughout Mexica and Canada and maybe even looking beyond those. So it's certainly geographic expansion. Um, number two is we need to have really uh penetrated through that outbound marketing and this and that, at least make sure people know that we exist, that we can help them in order to through the logistic service providers, uh, the insurers, shippers being a big focus in the future for us, not in a way that's gonna under uh cut brokers. It's actually gonna help brokers. We got some cool um items on our roadmap to do that. But we need to have built products that really resonate with those different industries, and we need to get that the word and they need to be to using it. Um so I would say if we what it would look like success if three to five years ago uh from now, certainly our valuation is much higher than the valuation we raised at now. But number two is we want to be a household name. Then when people say the word truck, gen logs comes to mind. That it's always, I gotta figure out uh which trucks are using certain tires, gen logs. I gotta figure out uh which trucks are using certain trailers that might need rentals, gen logs. And that if trucks and gen logs are synonymous as words, then we will have like really done our job there because people always come to us first to say, can you help us with this data problem we're trying to solve? And we should be able to say yes.

SPEAKER_01 53:57

I love it. And tire companies, that's a new uh potential vertical lead for you. There you go. Well, listen, um, this was really great. I I love talking to you. I love hearing about your business. It always gets me fired up and just thinking about new stuff and new ways to help move our industry forward. And I think that's what you're doing. And I think with uh 60 million bucks, it's gonna be a little easier for you to do. So uh congratulations on the Rays. I appreciate you coming back on the show. Um, and that's all we got. Look, someday maybe we could do this the third time. That'd be pretty cool. So give me a reason to do it a third time. All right, man. Thank you to our listeners.