EDRAY Receives $7M To Improve Port Logistics Through Flow Stacking

EDRAY, a drayage platform, is looking to revolutionize the way technology executes port logistics.

The company announced Tuesday it is looking to accelerate its growth and expand its suite of drayage solutions with a recent $7 million investment from logistics entrepreneur and investor Andrew Leto.

Leto, founder of GlobalTranz and 10-4 and investor in Emerge, My Carrier and Roadrunner Transportation, will now sit on the board of EDRAY.

Many current drayage solutions focus on optimizing certain pieces of drayage shipment management, often focusing on capacity matching or visibility alone. EDRAY takes a collaborative approach among a number of shippers to coordinate incoming port pickups through a process called flow stacking.

EDRAY first works with incoming container ships to block stow its customers' containers, a method in which all cargo is stowed together with other cargo going to the same location. From there, the company flow stacks its carriers to take those containers off together, eliminating the need for detention and demurrage chargebacks.

Leto explained in an interview with FreightWaves that this collaboration also gives shippers a marketplace to bid their shipments out to handfuls of drayage carriers available in these port regions.

"It's really two things: It's a marketplace and a destination management system," he said. "Every shipper is siloed and doing it all by themselves, trying to manage it with their own team and the five drayage carriers they work with. EDRAY combines the freight of all of these companies and attracts drayage carriers to come in and bid on that freight as a whole, reducing the shipper's costs."

Leto explained that once these containers are empty, they are not immediately brought back empty to the port like many drayage transactions. Instead, EDRAY coordinates with the port's regional exporters to bring the container back full, ready to be loaded back onto the ship.

These process improvements have led to a 40% increase in drayage productivity, five times less rehandling, and 25% fewer emissions, according to the company.

Leto explained that digitizing an untapped mode of transportation is what attracted him and the company's new chief commercial officer, Brett Parker, co-founder and president of Cargomatic, to space.

"Drayage is one of the biggest pain points for shippers right now," Leto said. "They are obviously dealing with the overseas container costs and drayage is adding big time to the mess. With our solutions, customers can now outsource their port logistics to us or they can keep their teams in place and use our technology to optimize it themselves."

Reade Kidd, the president of EDRAY, said he was excited about working with Leto.

"We're thrilled to have Andrew Leto's strategic and financial support to strengthen our position as we continue to build out the EDRAY platform," he said. "The industry has been plagued with congestion at the ports that negatively impact the movement of freight and results in significant costs. EDRAY is delivering relief for shippers with collaborative, innovative solutions, real-time visibility data and increased capacity from our Drayage Marketplace to expedite containers inbound and outbound."

Articles by Grace Sharkey