Earlier today, Chicago-based project44, a provider of supply chain visibility services, said is it separating its operations into what it called two focused businesses.
One business, the company said, will retain the project44 name, and serve enterprise shippers as a Decision Intelligence Platform. And the other business, entitled LSP44, will debut as a dedicated, profitable, AI-Native company, with purpose-built AI Agent and API Infrastructure for logistics services providers: 3PLs, freight forwarders, and brokers.
Founded in 2014, project44 entered the market with a focus on replacing manual processes with a real-time API covering rate quotes, dispatch, visibility, and documentation. The company explained that early adoption by leading logistics service providers (LSPs) helped build the carrier network, integrations, and data infrastructure that comprise its current platform. Which is now used by nine of the world’s ten largest LSPs, making LSP44 a key foundation for industry leaders. Over the past decade, project44 expanded into the enterprise shipper market, evolving into a Decision Intelligence Platform, spanning TMS, visibility, yard management, and last-mile operations, all powered by its core API and agent infrastructure.
Jett McCandless, project44 Founder and CEO, provided LM with a detailed overview of the announcement in the Q&A below.
LM: What drove the need for project44 to create two separate businesses? How long had it been planned or in the works?
McCandless: project44’s Decision Intelligence Platform was built for enterprise shippers, who need a living ecosystem of the supply chain in motion. Orders, inventory, transportation, carriers, yards, last mile, and risk signals are all critical components of that picture for shippers.
3PLs need something categorically different: agentic infrastructure they can run their own operations on and embed directly into their own products, carrier procurement, dispatch, exception recovery, freight audit, and the work their teams do manually today, all supported by AI agents that take action and keep the team focused on strategic, value-add work
Those are different products, different buyers, different roadmaps, and if we kept building both inside one company, the 3PL-specific work would always be competing for engineering time against the shipper roadmap. This isn’t a new idea for me. I started project44 in 2014 after owning and operating a 3PL myself, so LSP44 is really the completion of a thought I’ve had since day one: formalized once it was clear 3PLs needed their own dedicated leadership, roadmap, and speed, not a division inside someone else’s company.
LM: What are the main benefits, as well as notable, or significant, changes of these moves for project44 customers, on both the enterprise shipper side and the 3PL, freight forwarder, and broker side?
McCandless: For enterprise shippers, nothing changes. project44 continues exactly as it is today. Same Decision Intelligence Platform, same agentic workflows, same team, same contract. If you’re a shipper, you won’t feel this at all.
The benefit is that roadmap no longer shares engineering bandwidth with 3PL-specific work, so it gets full focus. For 3PLs, the change is substantial: they now get LSP44, agentic infrastructure built exclusively for logistics service providers. That means production-grade AI agents that automate the workflows a 3PL runs manually today—carrier procurement, rate and quote, tender and booking, dispatch and appointment scheduling, carrier onboarding, exception and disruption recovery, documents, and freight audit and settlement.
It deploys in weeks, not quarters, connects into the systems a 3PL already runs without a rip-and-replace, and most customers have agents live and handling real volume within their first month. These aren’t assistants that surface a recommendation for someone to act on, they execute autonomously, around the clock, across every lane and shift.
LM: Are there any areas, or ways, in which project44 and LSP44 will overlap, or collaborate, when working with customers?
McCandless: Yes. Both run on the same underlying network and data foundation: 280,000-plus carriers, 8 billion signals, more than a decade of live freight data.
In practice, that overlap shows up most directly through our 3PL customers themselves. Some run their own fleet as a carrier on our network while also using LSP44 to manage carrier relationships and visibility as a 3PL. Their own shipper customers, meanwhile, often already run on project44’s Decision Intelligence Platform, supported by the world’s largest, most accurate, real-time logistics data graph—now trusted by more than 1,300 leading brands moving over a billion shipments a year across 185 countries.
This means the shipper on the other end of that shipment sees the same data, through the same underlying infrastructure, no matter which company’s product they’re touching. That’s the collaboration in practice: one network, two purpose-built businesses sitting on top of it.
LM: Will your enterprise shipper customers continue using the same platform? If not, what will it look like?
McCandless: Yes. Nothing shifts for our shipper customers. project44 continues to operate as the full Decision Intelligence Platform it is today—transportation management, visibility, yard management, and eCommerce logistics, all orchestrated by AI agents—same team, same integration, same contract.
What’s new is additive: LSP44 standing up as its own business for the other side of the relationship, the 3PLs, who haven’t had infrastructure built specifically around their operations before.
LM: Will any existing products move exclusively to LSP44? Can customers use both companies’ offerings together? How will product roadmaps differ?
McCandless: LSP customers will get the benefit of the project44 with an added focus of LSP specific solutions through our dedicated roadmap.
The agent and infrastructure layer built specifically for 3PL operations including agents for carrier procurement, rate and quote, tender and booking, dispatch and appointment scheduling, carrier onboarding, ocean execution, exception and disruption recovery, documents and eBOL, and freight audit and settlement LSP44 has a dedicated roadmap, built and prioritized entirely around how 3PLs actually run.
The network and data foundation underneath stays shared. Because of that, and because a meaningful number of 3PLs are also project44 shipper customers or carriers on our own network, the two are already working together inside the same freight ecosystem today, even as separate businesses with separate teams.
Regarding product roadmaps: project44’s stays shipper-centric—iTMS, Visibility, YMS, Ecommerce Logistics, and agentic workflow tools for shippers. LSP44’s is built entirely around 3PL operations: the agentic infrastructure I just described, deployed in weeks and running in the background from day one.
There are different buyers and different priorities—and now each roadmap gets full engineering focus instead of splitting it with the other.
