Cartage: giving freight teams their day back

A shipment can look simple on a spreadsheet. Then the carrier needs a confirmation, the warehouse changes its pickup window, and a customer asks for an updated arrival time. Someone has to keep all of those conversations moving.

Cartage is building Wilson to take on that coordination work. For a manufacturer or distributor, the appeal is practical: give routine freight tasks a place to go, so the operations team has more time for the shipments that need its judgment. [1]

Built by people who know freight software

Founded in 2023 and part of Y Combinator’s Summer 2024 batch, Cartage is led by co-founders Abdul Basharat, CEO, and Josh Lampen, CTO. Both worked at trucking software company Rose Rocket: Basharat in product, and Lampen on the platform team, where he led work on its first workflow engine. That background gives the company a close view of the systems freight teams already use. [2]

One coordinator, three parts of the job

Wilson works through an email address on the customer’s domain and connects with existing operational tools. Cartage presents three capabilities under that broader product:

These are parts of the same freight operation. Cartage also says its human team steps in when something goes wrong. That matters when a late truck requires a decision someone has to own. [1]

Where the product becomes useful

Turning a daily quote routine into a repeatable process

Cartage’s Musser Biomass case study gives the clearest picture of the work involved. Before Wilson, the company’s logistics manager handled more than 12 shipments a day and sent eight quote requests per shipment. Preparing and sending those requests took about half an hour per load—more than six hours a day in that routine alone.

The published case describes Wilson receiving orders through ERP or CSV files and coordinating the steps that follow. Musser’s team retains carrier selection and approvals. The reported change is less time managing spreadsheets and email, with people still making the decisions that require them. [3]

Keeping shipment documents and communications together

At Ergomotion, the problem extended beyond sending quotes. Packing lists needed to be read and reconciled, warehouses had particular document requirements, and truckload and less-than-truckload shipments followed different processes.

Cartage describes Wilson extracting shipment details, coordinating documents with warehouses and recipients, handling carrier procurement, and keeping the conversation in the same email thread. Missing information or decisions are flagged for people. It is a useful example of how much work sits between receiving an order and getting it shipped. [4]

Bringing consistency to a branch network

Cloverdale Paint offers a different use case. Its published case describes an initial rollout at selected branches, with Wilson comparing carriers, coordinating quotes and bookings through email, and producing daily freight reports. For an operations leader, the interesting part is the prospect of applying a more consistent process across locations. The case describes work in progress, rather than a completed company-wide result. [5]

Where Cartage stands on SOTA2

Wilson ranks first in SOTA2’s Orchestrate Workflows comparison for Logistics & Supply Chain. The comparison covers 27 candidate products from 18 companies, with 10 products receiving ranked positions. Wilson stands out in that evidence review for covering several connected steps—creating, booking and tracking shipments—across the tools freight teams already work in.

Both comparisons are scoped to Logistics & Supply Chain. Snapshot: October 14, 2026, 10:03 p.m. PT; checked October 15. Rankings use AI review of available evidence and a weighted rubric covering task fit, adoption, product detail, pricing and market fit. They do not represent hands-on performance testing. View the comparison and methodology.

What we would look for in a pilot

For a COO, we would start with a defined set of shipments and ask how many still need manual follow-up, where approvals happen, and how exceptions reach the right person. A process that works on routine loads also needs a clear handoff when a delivery becomes urgent.

For a CFO, we would compare the full cost of operating that process: the service, implementation, staff time and any change in freight spend. The Musser example provides a useful baseline for the work involved; it does not establish a universal number of hours saved. Those results need to come from the buyer’s own shipment mix.

This spotlight draws on Cartage’s public product information, its published customer case studies, YC’s company profile and SOTA2’s ranking snapshot. Customer experiences are reported by Cartage; SOTA2 has not independently audited those outcomes.