A new platform has emerged, created for freight brokers but keeping carriers top of mind. Param and Annalise Sandhu, owners of former California-based trucking company White Falcon, recently brought their new venture Chaine out of stealth mode. The AI-powered capacity and visibility platform aims to help brokerages automate manual work, from the sourcing of qualified carriers to visibility.

It’s that manual work that led the couple to launch Chaine.

Chaine co-founder Annalise Sandhu said as owners of a trucking company, they couldn’t find an existing tool on the market that would solve the problems they were facing when it came to working with brokers, so that inspired them to create their own.

“We got fed up with the manual work, so we closed shop, taught ourselves to code and founded Chaine … We saw a big opportunity to build software to solve some of the problems we were facing,” Sandhu said. “Freight brokers and truck carriers just don’t have an easy way to work together. There is a ton of manual work involved with coordinating freight, both from the booking and capacity side to the tracking side.”

“Our goal is to help freight brokers to more easily work with their network of carriers, from finding carriers to haul loads to tracking a load all the way to delivery.”

The Chaine platform, deployed via web and mobile application, integrates with a broker’s many vetting tools to provide all of a carrier’s data at the point of bid so brokers can weed out those that don’t match their criteria up front, eliminating the manual process of sourcing carriers from multiple different places. The booking platform’s suggestions feature provides a list of suggested carriers who have run a particular lane before, along with their trip history and the average rate that carrier has charged for that lane to help brokers better negotiate and re-engage those carriers in the future.

Chaine has the digital footprint of over 100,000 carriers on its platform.

The platform also provides tracking for each shipment, enabling carriers to share load information via ELD, EDI, CSV export over FTP, and API. Brokers can see where their shipment is on the map, load status and who the dispatchers and drivers on the load are, and geofencing provides accurate pickup and drop-off times.

Sandhu said vetted carrier information on the front end and tracking helps brokers detect fraudulent carriers as well. The platform can detect suspicious activity like if a carrier is using simulated tracking.

In addition, the platform provides Copilot, a personal assistant for each team member that uses AI to automate workflows to further eliminate manual work. Brokers can set up rules that trigger an action using data from their favorite apps to create more efficiency.

“We saw an opportunity to provide a platform where freight brokers and truck carriers can just more easily work together to avoid some of this manual work,” Sandhu said.

The Sandhu’s have gone from scaling their own trucking company to helping brokers do the same.

Sandhu said Chaine customers are looking at AI as more of a way to grow their business with the same number of employees rather than viewing it necessarily as a cost-saving measure. And being on the other side as a trucking operation has helped the couple realize a focus on carriers can greatly benefit brokers.

“It gave us the perspective from the carrier side to see that the carrier is going through similar issues … Seeing it from the carrier side, now that we’re selling to freight brokers, part of our goal is to be able to provide a good user experience to the carriers,” she said. “When we’re building the product, although our primary customer is the freight broker, every single product decision we make, we’re thinking about the carrier experience because we were on the other side of it.”

Angel Coker Jones is a senior editor of Commercial Carrier Journal, covering the technology, safety and business segments. In her free time, she enjoys hiking and kayaking, horseback riding, foraging for medicinal plants and napping. She also enjoys traveling to new places to try local food, beer and wine. Reach her at [email protected].