This week, Trimble closed the acquisition of our portfolio company Kuebix. It’s always bittersweet to sell a company, but the combination of Trimble’s network of private fleet and commercial carrier customers and Kuebix’s community of thousands of shipping companies was too valuable for buyer or seller to pass up.

Kuebix combines an enterprise SaaS solution and a transaction marketplace and could represent a new hybrid approach that brings the best of both worlds.

I first met Dan Clark, the Founder and President, nearly 10 years ago, when Kuebix was called CarrierStore. Back then, it was a managed services business, helping shippers save money on their transportation costs with mostly manual efforts. It was clear, however, from those early days, that Dan, a colorful Bostonian from the mill town of Maynard, had a gift of translating trucking needs into technology speak, a vision for the future and the personal drive to make it happen. We kept in touch as the company developed.

Once Pillar was up and running, we reconnected with the company and one of the Kuebix Board members asked me for an introduction to someone who could help advise the company on sales and marketing issues. We introduced Dave Lemont, a serial CEO and go-to-market wizard who my prior firm had backed successfully at Revit and AppIQ. After a month of consulting, Dave called me and shared that the opportunity in front of Kuebix was enormous and the company had the right vision to get there. That was the final confirmation we needed — we decided to invest and subsequently Dave joined as the CEO of the company.

Three short years later, Kuebix was well on its way to disrupting both the transportation management software and 3PL spaces and had attracted 21,000 customers to its platform.

The Kuebix 1–2 Punch

On the SaaS side, the company’s Shipper product is the “control tower” for a company’s transportation department. Whereas incumbent products are clunky and old, Kuebix is simple, intuitive and fresh. The product integrates directly with a Shipper’s ERP system such as NetSuite or Microsoft Dynamics, directly downloading purchase orders, determining their shipping needs and identifying who among a shipper’s contracted carriers (truck, rail, parcel, air) has the best rates for that lane.

On the Marketplace side, Kuebix Community Load Match, is a marketplace to help shippers quickly and easily connect to trucks with available capacity at spot market rates, earning a transaction fee for each matched load.

Customers could join the Marketplace for free and would then learn about the SaaS capabilities and benefits. Together, this became a powerful way to acquire customers cost-effectively.

Furthermore, by having an enormous network of customers and knowledge of what goods needed to go where, Kuebix can reduce transportation costs across the entire network because they know where trucks are already headed, what additional stops they can make on the way or on the way home (when they are often empty).

Together, this hybrid model combines the positive network effects and explosive growth potential of a marketplace with the recurring revenue and stickiness of a SaaS solution. We think this model has legs in other industries.

We couldn’t be happier for Dan, Dave and the rest of the Kuebix team and look forward to seeing their full vision realized as part of Trimble.