The Last-Mover Problem

A startup called Sennder is trying to bring an extremely tech-resistant industry into the age of apps 

- Austin Carr

The big rigs rolling along highways and beeping back into warehouses move the world’s cargo. Amazon boxes, furniture crates, pallets of bananas, perhaps the gadget you’re using to read this story—really, every item within your reach has likely been hauled on multiple semis. Yet this diesel-gulping industry is also a marvel of inefficiency, rife with problems that have proved shockingly immune to the magic wand of technology. For about 20% of its miles on the road, the average freight truck carries nothing. Such “empty miles” are a sad joke in the business: The planet’s most shipped good is air.

Off the A4 autostrada in southwestern Poland, at a small lot lined with tractor-trailers on the outskirts of Boleslawiec, Mariusz Grzes is figuring out how to reduce his empty kilometers. Demar-Trans, his company, has a fleet of 28 trucks contracted to transport everything from car seats to dog food to plastics across Europe. Managing the loads is a daily migraine of new orders and rate negotiations and shipment tracking usually handled by email and phone. Then there’s the wait to receive payment, which can take three months of processing while Grzes is forced to cover the overhead. “We struggle with getting paid all the time,” he says on a November afternoon inside his four-desk headquarters, where a couple administrators and dispatchers are drowning in printed invoices and schedules.