The tech stack that was at the heart of now-defunct digital brokerage Convoy is on the move again, being sold to DAT in a move seen as significantly broadening that company’s value proposition in the freight market.
Freight forwarder Flexport, which acquired the tech stack from the remnants of Convoy less than two years ago, said Monday it is selling the product to DAT.
When a company retreats from something it bought quickly, it is often a sign of defeat. (An old reference certainly, but the deal by Quaker Oats (NYSE: PEP) in the 90’s to buy beverage maker Snapple for $1.4 billion, only to sell it back to its original owners three years later for $300 million, is considered the ultimate example of that sort of humbling failure).
There is no sign that is the case with the quick flip of the Convoy tech stack.
Ryan Petersen, the CEO of Flexport, said the return on the sale of the Convoy tech “puts Flexport in an awesome place financially.” When Flexport purchased the Convoy tech stack in late 2023, the price on the transaction was reportedly $16 million, though neither company confirmed that price. The sale to DAT reportedly was made at a price near $250 million, though the companies declined to disclose the sales price.
Besides the strong return on investment, Petersen, in a joint interview with DAT’s CEO Jeff Clementz, said the presence of a powerful technology tool serving brokers that is supposed to be neutral could often complicate Flexport’s primary business of freight forwarding.
Neutral might not be neutral
“What we realized is that a neutral platform is not neutral,” Petersen said. “We have a brokerage. We’re a massive freight forwarding company.” The combination, he said, raised questions in the industry whether the Convoy platform truly could be seen as neutral.
It’s not the first time a company in the freight tech world has wrestled with the issue. When what is now Triumph Financial (NASDAQ: TFIN) bought HubTran to serve as an open loop auditing system for brokers and factoring companies, Triumph’s management took great pains, repeatedly, to stress that its traditional factoring business could not get an inside look at what its factoring competitors who were using the legacy HubTran platform were doing.
Petersen noted that the digital brokerage business that came with its 2023 acquisition of the Convoy tech stack will remain with Flexport. It processes about 100,000 loads per year, he said, 98% of which are completed with no human involvement.
It will also continue to use the Convoy system even though it will now be owned by DAT, according to Petersen. “On day one, we will be their biggest customer and we hope to continue to be their biggest customer,” he said.
A widening range of offerings from DAT
For DAT, the purchase is possibly transformative. In the past several months, besides promoting Clementz to CEO, it has purchased visibility provider Trucker Tools and payments platform Outgo. (Clementz said DAT did not pursue an acquisition of the Convoy tech stack when it was first offered for sale as part of the Convoy bankruptcy).
With the purchase of the Convoy tech stack, it has now vastly increased its range of offerings to the freight sector with capabilities that have moved well beyond its traditional load board.
Clementz, in his interview with FreightWaves, laid out what might be considered the three segments of how loads are offered into the market. About 50% of broker loads, he said, get moved through a broker’s private network. But after that, he said, “you might go to other load boards,” adding that DAT is the “backstop you need to go to, ultimately, especially in the last 24 to 48 hours.”
If brokers choose to use their private network, Clementz said, that also may come with a decision to put the load on what will now be DAT’s Convoy platform, “because I don’t have to touch it. And if it all works, fantastic. If not, then I’ll intervene and I’ll work it through the load board.”
Ultimately, he said, DAT believes the Convoy platform, with its power of automation to get shipper and carrier together, will be the first place that loads will be placed.
But from there, Clementz said, if a match isn’t made it can “waterfall” down to the DAT platform.
“We think we can go directly from the shipper to the TMS (transportation management system) and into the Convoy platform directly and then move to the load board,” Clementz said. The Convoy tech team–which is coming over to DAT in the deal–already has been working with TMS providers to have loads in a TMS populate into the Convoy platform automatically.
Load board will continue to be dominant for awhile
But change isn’t overnight. “We actually think the load board will be the primary use case for quite a long time,” Clementz said.
Fraud prevention is expected to be a major selling point of the broader DAT product offering, Clementz said. DAT already was set to launch a fraud management solution before the deal with Flexport.
But the Convoy system long had been admired for its own fraud prevention tools, Clementz said. Building it into the DAT platform on top of its own capabilities “will really make DAT the safest platform,” he added.
There will be no upfront fees for DAT users to sign up to use the Convoy platform, Clementz said. Fees will be transactional, so a DAT user can access the Convoy system with no payments unless a transaction is completed.
But that fact also is a driver to the deal, according to Clementz. Bringing in new users on to the system has an extremely low customer acquisition cost, which often goes by the acronym CAC, and that may slow some early adoption, he added.
“I think we will have more demand than we can handle for onboarding, so we’ll probably have to create a wait list because there’s no cost to sign up for this,” Clementz said. “It will take time for us to integrate accounts, set them up and get them going.”
DAT is a unit of publicly-traded Roper Technologies. (NASDAQ: ROP) In the company’s latest conference call with analysts, president and CEO Laurence Hunn said DAT’s financial performance in the second quarter “was solid…and had strong (average revenue per unit improvements).” DAT data is not broken out separately in the Roper earnings.
Hunn also said DAT had made “significant progress” integrating Trucker Tools into its system.
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