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Emerge has named George Abernathy Chairman of its Board of Directors. Abernathy's leadership experience in freight, logistics, procurement and freight tech perfectly suits the Emerge position, with roles highlighted by President of Transplace (now Uber Freight), President of FreightWaves, and other leadership positions including J.B. Hunt and Sabre. He is active in FreightTech as a Strategic Advisor to NewRoad Capital Partners and Senior Partner at Venture 53, and sits on boards including Emerge and The Tranco Group.
Abernathy describes a significant part of his career as a long pursuit of optimality in freight procurement, and Emerge as the company built to deliver it.
In Abernathy's words,
it is the idea that the industry should be able to bring together the trusted right capacity, at the right price, at the right time, with the right information and incentives for everyone involved.
Early in his career he held senior roles at J.B. Hunt Transport and North American Van Lines, where capacity is something you own and dispatch, and then moved into the first wave of transportation technology at Sabre (with OptiBid as the first algorithm based procurement tool), Logistics.com, and Clicklogistics. Common denominator from 1997 was industry leader Tom Sanderson, who Abernathy cites as an extraordinary influence in his life and career, for his intelligence, leadership, strategic vision and honest way of leading.
Abernathy served as President of Transplace as the company grew into a top 3PL managing billions in North American freight spend, led by CEO Tom Sanderson. He went on to serve as the first President of FreightWaves, joining founder Craig Fuller in 2017.
He joined the Emerge board in 2020 and later served as the company's President, helping to construct the Commercial offering. Today he is a Senior Partner at Venture 53, a venture firm that invests only in transportation, logistics and supply chain technology, and a Strategic Advisor to NewRoad Capital Partners, an operator-led growth equity firm focused on supply chain and logistics technology. He also sits on the board of The Tranco Group, the Chattanooga logistics family founded by Bruce and Byron Trantham.
In short: he has bought freight at scale, he has sold technology to the people who buy freight, and he has led Emerge. Very few people in this industry have done all three.
Nearly a decade after Andrew and Michael Leto founded it, Abernathy describes Emerge as the fulfillment of his career-long pursuit of optimality in freight procurement: a technology company focused on transforming freight procurement, whose value is measured by what the technology delivers rather than the category it sits in. In his view Emerge is not solely a procurement platform or a TMS. It combines industry expertise, trusted relationships, data and technology to help shippers make more informed sourcing decisions and to create a more effective connection between transportation demand and available capacity, with contract and spot capabilities that reduce routing guide failures, access to qualified carriers with bad actors kept off the platform, and execution that follows the award.
The problem Abernathy has worked on for 30 years is the problem Emerge was built to solve, and the platform is now mature enough to deliver on it. As Chairman, he will work with the board and the leadership team to support the company's strategic direction, strengthen its long-term positioning and help guide its development as freight and technology keep changing.
“I want to thank Andrew and Michael Leto for building this company, and the Board for its trust in asking me to lead it. I am excited about Mark McEntire’s leadership and guidance, which comes at exactly the right time for Emerge. For nearly three decades, I have been pursuing what I think of as optimality in freight procurement: the idea that the industry should be able to bring together the right capacity, at the right price, at the right time, with the right information and incentives for everyone involved. Emerge is where that comes together.”
“Freight is too important to the economy, and procurement is too consequential to supply chain performance, for us to accept unnecessary friction, information gaps and inefficiencies as simply the cost of doing business. Technology creates an opportunity to do substantially better. The next chapter of freight procurement will be defined by how effectively we combine industry expertise, trusted relationships, data and technology, and Emerge is where that combination is being built.”
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