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Emerge founder Andrew Leto joined Freight Caviar's Freight Gong Friday live on Friday morning, July 24 — dialing in from Poland, where the show found him mid-travel. He shared the guest slot with Robert Miller, co-founder of Exhibit A, for a wide-ranging conversation on the state of the freight market, the technology carriers still refuse to adopt, and the idea he has now spent two decades building toward: a marketplace where freight buyers see all of their options at once.
Freight Gong Friday is Freight Caviar's live show, hosted by Reed Loustalot and Freight Caviar founder Paul-Bernard Jaroslawski. On Friday mornings, the two break down the week in freight — rates, capacity, fraud, tech, and whatever else the industry is arguing about — in front of a live audience on LinkedIn, X, and YouTube. It has become a regular morning stop for brokers, carriers, and shippers who want the week's news without the press-release polish.
That format is a good fit for Andrew. He founded GlobalTranz before founding Emerge, and he tends to say what he thinks about the market rather than what sounds safe.
The timing mattered. Freight is heading into the back half of 2026 with capacity tightening, carriers continuing to exit the market, and rates moving faster than most routing guides can keep up. Shippers who built their networks for a soft market are finding out how thin those networks really are. The ones holding up are running procurement more often, benchmarking against the live market, and keeping a deep bench of vetted carriers ready when a lane swings. We covered what that shift looks like in the data in our H2 2026 freight market outlook.
That is the backdrop Andrew walked into on Friday morning.
The through-line from Priceline to "your own marketplace." Asked for his story, Andrew went back to the beginning: five years in the Navy, no college degree, then his dad's small freight agency, where he watched LTL get quoted over the phone while "companies like Travelocity and Priceline were doing what they're doing for planes" (1:34:38). Why don't we do this for trucks? became GlobalTranz in 2005, one of the first platforms to put LTL carriers' rates — and logos — side by side on a screen. Not everyone was thrilled. He remembers an Estes executive calling him personally: "Boy, you better get my damn logo off your site right now" (1:39:15).
Truckload, he argued, never got its Priceline — hundreds of thousands of carriers, no published rates, no way to simply connect. That gap is Emerge. "We allow a truckload shipper to tie in with all their brokers and carriers," he explained. "If you're a shipper on Emerge, you see all your carriers lined up one by one — from lowest cost, transit time, to the end" (1:48:14). The punchline is the one that stuck with us: "When you go to Emerge today, for a shipper, it very much feels like your own marketplace" (1:49:05). And the scale behind it, in his words: "Emerge has $15 billion of freight moving through our platform — $4 billion of which is spot" (1:52:45).
His read on the spot market. Blunt, as usual: "Spot's been blown up lately — it's double what it was last year" (1:48:30). He kept coming back to how scattered pricing really is — identical loads clearing hundreds of dollars apart depending on which broker touches them on a given day (1:54:14). For shippers, that dispersion is the whole argument for procurement that runs against a live market instead of a stale routing guide: when rates move this fast, seeing your entire network compete beats trusting any single quote.
AI agents, or the cheapest money in freight. The hill Andrew chose to die on this episode: carriers and dispatchers should put AI phone agents to work now — posting trucks, fielding the flood of broker calls, and surfacing the best-paying loads instead of the first one. "There's always a 10% better-paying load if you just be patient" (1:51:50). He was careful to frame it as augmentation, not replacement — dispatchers keep the relationships, the bots just answer the phones — and the math, he insisted, is not close: "Every carrier should be really thinking about this right now, and it's not expensive. I guarantee one or two loads will pay for that AI for the whole month" (2:01:55). His warning to the mid-sized fleets still screening calls by hand: the brokers calling you are already using bots.
Why it's the best time ever to start a company. Asked to close with his read on twenty years of freight tech, Andrew got animated. What used to take $20 million and a multi-year build now takes months and one or two engineers — with a catch. "Anyone can do it… your tech is not your moat anymore. It's really your data and who you're connected to" (2:05:25). Still: "The best time ever to start a company is today" (2:04:25).
The full episode is available on YouTube — Andrew's segment starts around 1:32:00.
Thanks to Paul, Reed, and the Freight Caviar team for having Andrew on. If you want a founder's honest read on where this market is headed — and the case for running freight like your own marketplace — his half hour is worth your time.
