Jett McCandless Takes First FreightTech Vanguard Award at F3 in Chattanooga

project44 founder and CEO Jett McCandless received the first-ever FreightTech Vanguard Award at FreightWaves' F3: Future of Freight Festival dinner in Chattanooga, Tennessee, on Monday, capping a decade in which his visibility platform grew to 286,000 carriers across 194 countries and territories.

The award, presented by FreightWaves, recognizes founders for long-term impact on freight and logistics. That distinction matters. The event's FreightTech 25 — an annual ranking of the most influential freight technology companies, drawn from the FreightTech 100 announced in late September — honors companies for their current influence. The Vanguard Award honors the people who built them. FreightWaves selected McCandless independently.

What did the judges see in him?

Craig Fuller, FreightWaves' CEO, framed the choice in founder terms as he handed over the trophy.

"So many technologies and innovations are driven by the vision, the relentlessness, the grind of our founders," Fuller said. "We thought that this particular founder represented the best example of all of those characteristics."

He argued project44 "defined a category" — real-time shipment and supply chain visibility — and then pushed its platform beyond that starting point. Fuller credited McCandless with something rarer than persistence: the willingness to change course.

"I know that what they have built is not what they initially envisioned," Fuller said. "I think that's ultimately what being a founder is all about: applying grit, dedication, innovation, at times humility, admitting that things you set out to do may not be relevant currently, that markets change."

How did project44 get here?

McCandless founded the Chicago company in 2014 to give shippers, carriers and logistics providers real-time data on shipments in transit, so businesses could track freight and run transportation operations off live information rather than phone calls and spreadsheets.

Ten years on, the network he described on stage processes more than 700 million synchronized events a day.

Then came this year's restructuring. In July, project44 split into two businesses: project44 itself, serving enterprise shippers, and LSP44, which supplies AI agents and APIs to logistics service providers — freight brokers, forwarders and third-party logistics companies. The split separates the shipper-facing visibility business from a technology stack aimed squarely at intermediaries.

For McCandless, the recognition carried personal weight.

"To have that recognition from him (Fuller) has made for one of the most proud moments of my life," he said.

He dedicated the award to the people who absorb freight's worst moments, and he put himself in that group.

"I want to accept this award on behalf of everyone who's picked up the phone at 2 a.m. because a load went sideways," McCandless said. "I've been that person, and I know a lot of you here have been too."

What does the AI pivot change for shippers and forwarders?

The company's next chapter centers on AI agents — a logistics operating system McCandless pitched as a way to replace that 2 a.m. call entirely. He was blunt about the bar agents have to clear. Building one is now the easy part, he noted; what makes an agent useful is how deeply it understands freight and the different businesses inside it.

"'On time' means something totally different for a retailer than it does for a port," McCandless said. "An agent that doesn't know that isn't smart. It's just confidently wrong."

He sketched the destination: a system that already knows what went wrong, which reroute options exist and which carriers can best handle the recovery — before a human dials anyone.

He closed with a message for other founders in the room, aimed at the unglamorous end of the trade.

"To every founder out there doing the hard work, the unglamorous work: keep going," McCandless said.

With LSP44 barely three months old and agent-based operations now the stated focus, the award lands at the exact moment McCandless is betting the company's second decade on AI — and on persuading brokers and forwarders that confident, industry-fluent agents beat generic automation.