Wednesday, November 4, 2026
The news that moves freight
Ocean Nov 4, 2026 · 7 min read

project44 shipper new ARR up 49%

project44 wants the shipper’s whole freight desk, air and ocean included

project44, the freight visibility company, said from Chicago on Tuesday 3 November that new annual recurring revenue from its shipper customers grew 49% year on year in the third quarter of its fiscal 2027. Annual recurring revenue (ARR) is the yearly value of subscription contracts. “New” ARR is the value of contracts signed in the period. That is up from the 34% growth the company reported for the first half of the year in August.

Our view: two things are happening here. One is clear, and one is not.

The clear part is strategy. project44 started out showing shippers where their loads were. It is now selling a full transport management system that covers trucking, rail, parcel, air and ocean. That puts it in the same seat forwarders want with their own shipper portals and control towers. A control tower is a single screen where a shipper watches and manages all its freight.

The unclear part is size. Every growth figure in the release is a percentage. Not one comes with a dollar base. The headline AI claim comes from a 10-question test the company ran itself. Both deserve a careful read before anyone treats them as proof.

What project44 reported

The release gives these figures for what it calls “Q3 FY27 results for its shipper business”:

  • New ARR up 49% year on year.
  • Average selling prices for new customers up 382%. The release says this took them “to the highest in company history.”
  • Net revenue retention “up approximately 600 basis points year over year.” Net revenue retention (NRR) shows how much more, or less, existing customers spend after upgrades and cancellations. A basis point is one hundredth of a percentage point, so 600 basis points is 6 points.
  • Intelligent TMS shipper revenue up 59%.
  • 155 “product innovations” in the quarter, in the company’s words.

The company says its network includes 285,000 carriers, more than 1.5 billion shipments a year and over 1,000 brands.

Jett McCandless, founder and CEO, said: “Customers are placing bigger bets on project44, and the proof is coming from outside our own walls.”

The “outside” proof he means is analyst rankings. The release says G2, a software review site, named the product a Leader in seven reports. IDC put it in its 2026 MarketScape for TMS software as a Major Player. Nucleus Research called it an Accelerator. Better Supply Chains, run by former Gartner research vice president Bart De Muynck, ranked it first of 11 vendors. “In our TMS NExus assessment, project44’s Intelligent TMS scored 88 out of 100, the highest of the 11 vendors we evaluated, and reached Level 5, our top maturity tier,” De Muynck said in the release.

Charles Brennan, principal analyst at Nucleus Research, said project44 “has extended beyond visibility into a broader transportation management role.”

Why the percentages need a base

Growth rates without a starting point are hard to judge. A 382% rise in average deal size could mean a few very large contracts. It could also mean a low starting point. The release does not give the number of new customers, the dollar value of new ARR or total revenue. Neither did the August release.

The August release helps a little. It said project44 had signed its first customer worth $5 million in ARR, along with two seven-figure deals. It said average contract value for new customers was up 145% year on year, to an all-time high. Our read: deal sizes are rising, probably on a small number of large enterprise wins. But the two releases use different measures, contract value then and selling price now, so the 145% and the 382% are not directly comparable.

Net revenue retention tells a more modest story. August reported a 654-basis-point gain in Q2. November reports “approximately 600.” The gain is still large, but it is slightly smaller than last quarter’s.

One customer figure has also been used before. The November release says: “In detention and demurrage alone, one enterprise customer reduced its exposure by $6 million.” Detention and demurrage (D&D) are the charges for keeping containers or equipment past the free time. The same $6 million figure, for one unnamed customer, was in the August release, where it was credited to Mo. The other customer results are stated as “up to”: up to 4% lower freight costs, up to 17% better on-time delivery and up to 60% fewer check calls. A check call is a phone call or email to ask a carrier where a load is. “Up to” figures show the best case, not the typical one.

The AI test, read carefully

The release’s most eye-catching claim is about Mo, the AI analyst the company says it launched in July. project44 says Mo now serves 210 customers and has answered more than 50,000 questions.

It says: “In internal testing, Mo beat Anthropic’s Claude Opus 5.5 on each, with both systems working from the same underlying data.” On accuracy, it says, “Mo answered 10 of 10 verified test questions correctly and Claude Opus 5.5 answered 2 of 10 correctly.” On consistency, Mo gave the same answer all 10 times a question was asked, against 2 of 10 for Claude. On speed, Mo was 2.5 times faster.

The release does not say what the 10 questions were, who wrote them or who verified the answers. Ten questions is a small test. The company built Mo and ran the test itself, and it names no outside reviewer. Our view: this is a sales claim, not a benchmark.

The release does make one point worth keeping. It says that “Mo’s harness, not the model, drives these results.” A harness is the software around an AI model. It finds the right data, sets the rules and checks the output. In plain terms, project44 is saying the edge comes from its data and plumbing, not from a smarter model. That is believable. A general AI model given a raw freight database will often struggle with carrier codes, time zones and milestone definitions that a purpose-built tool already knows.

project44 also announced a partnership with Snowflake, the cloud data company, “to advance reliable, AI-powered supply chain decision-making through Mo.” The release gives no customer count or timing for the partnership.

What it means for forwarders

The scope of the product matters more than the growth rate. The release says Intelligent TMS covers “freight procurement, planning, execution, visibility, and freight audit across truckload, less-than-truckload, intermodal, rail, air, ocean, and parcel.” Less-than-truckload (LTL) means shared truck loads. The release says the system “deploys in three months and runs as a standalone system or alongside an incumbent TMS.”

Three things follow for forwarders.

First, shippers on platforms like this will judge forwarders by data, not by relationship. If the shipper’s own screen shows your ETA accuracy against a network of 285,000 carriers, your milestones need to be on time and in the right format. Bunge’s director of logistics, Jim Hawk, said in the release that project44 helps “from evaluating carriers during RFPs and spot bids to managing ongoing performance.” Expect the same scoring to reach forwarders in air and ocean tenders.

Second, the forwarder’s own control tower becomes a harder sell to large shippers. Many forwarders pitch their portal as the place a shipper manages its freight. A shipper that has bought a multimodal TMS from a software company will want the forwarder to plug into that system instead. The forwarder becomes one data source among many.

Third, data feeds become part of the service. Forwarders that can send clean, timely shipment events through an API (a direct system-to-system link) will be easier to keep. Those that still send spreadsheets by email will look slow on a dashboard that updates in real time.

None of this means software firms will replace forwarders. They do not book space, handle customs or fix a missed connection at 2am. But they are taking the reporting and analysis layer, which is part of what shippers have paid forwarders for.

Our prediction

project44 reported results in August and November, about three months apart. On that pattern, its next shipper update should come by end of February 2027.

Our call: that release will again report growth rates and no absolute ARR or revenue figure. We also expect no outside party to publish a repeat of the Mo versus Claude Opus 5.5 test by then. For forwarders, the practical call is this: by the end of Q1 2027, expect more large-shipper air and ocean tenders to ask for direct data feeds into a third-party TMS as a standard requirement.

Sources

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