Desteia using AI to ease looming customs compliance crunch

As U.S. companies brace for stricter enforcement of Mexico’s Manifestación de Valor Electrónica (MVE) requirements on June 1, supply chain technology provider Desteia is launching an autonomous platform aimed at reducing compliance headaches for importers moving freight south of the border.

Mexico’s mandatory electronic customs value declaration requires importers to file an MVE for every shipment entering the country before freight can clear customs. 

Beginning June 1, errors in filings can trigger fines and shipment delays, while liability now falls directly on the importer rather than the customs broker.

Mexico-focused trade technology company Desteia said its newly launched Auto-MVE platform automates much of the filing process by extracting shipment data from emails and logistics documents, organizing the information and preparing submissions for Mexico’s customs portal.

“We built the tool literally last fall,” Francois Lavertu, co-founder of Desteia, told FreightWaves during an interview. “The companies started telling us, ‘You’re already pulling the same documents we need for compliance. Why don’t you apply your technology to that flow?’”

Desteia, founded in 2023, is a New York-based startup with operations in the U.S. and Mexico. The company was founded by former Tesla executive Lavertu, along with Stanford engineers and entrepreneurs Diego Solorzano and Austin Poor. Desteia aims to simplify logistics operations by using AI to extract and organize information from unstructured data sources such as emails, messages and logistics document

Importers scramble for compliance solutions

Lavertu said many importers remain unprepared despite Mexico delaying MVE enforcement multiple times.

“They’re not ready,” Lavertu said. “A lot of customers first tried to handle it in-house or push the work to customs brokers. But the brokers couldn’t legally take on the responsibility because the liability sits with the importer.”

Under the MVE rules, importers must upload and validate multiple trade documents, including invoices, bills of lading, certificates of origin, insurance records and Carta Porte documentation. A discrepancy between documents can trigger penalties or shipment holds.

Desteia estimates that 37% of MVE declarations currently contain errors.

“The problem is not the submission itself,” Lavertu said. “The problem is automatically extracting, grouping and comparing all the documents before they’re ready for submission.”

Lavertu said concern across the market has intensified in recent weeks as companies realize the scale of the operational burden ahead of the June 1 enforcement date.

Desteia recently opened registration for an AI-focused webinar on MVE compliance scheduled for May 27 and received nearly 600 signups within days, according to Lavertu.

“Everybody is really anxious about what this means for their operation, for their teams and for the risk,” Lavertu said.

AI tool designed around cross-border operations

Lavertu, who previously worked at companies including Tesla, Walmart, L’Oréal and LVMH, said Desteia originally focused on helping companies manage unstructured logistics data tied to cross-border operations in Mexico.

The platform scans trade team inboxes, identifies relevant shipping documents and groups them into digital “pedimento bundles” tied to customs entries.

According to Lavertu, Auto-MVE also converts documents into the file formats required by Mexico’s customs systems, automatically checks for inconsistencies between documents and retains filing information if Mexico’s customs portal goes offline during submission.

“We don’t require anybody to change how they work,” Lavertu said. “Everything’s automated and pulled from the systems they already use.”

Desteia said the platform can reduce MVE preparation time from more than an hour to under five minutes per declaration. One customer handling more than 5,000 annual import operations reportedly saved more than 50 hours of manual work during its first week using the software.

Automotive, retail and manufacturing sectors face pressure

Lavertu said the platform was designed primarily for large multinational importers operating in sectors such as automotive, retail, consumer packaged goods and manufacturing.

The automotive industry faces particular challenges because every auto part imported into Mexico now requires its own MVE filing.

For manufacturers operating just-in-time supply chains, filing mistakes could create broader production disruptions.

“This has opened a Pandora’s box into checking that things are right in trade,” Lavertu said. “Companies are realizing suppliers may have been putting incorrect pricing into invoices or other documents.”

Lavertu said the broader trend reflects Mexico’s ongoing push to digitize customs enforcement and improve oversight of cross-border trade.

“The MVE is not an anomaly,” Lavertu said in Desteia’s launch announcement. “It is part of a deliberate effort by the Mexican government to modernize customs controls, reduce undervaluation and generate revenue through trade enforcement.”

Desteia, which has raised approximately $11.5 million in seed funding, said it plans to continue expanding its AI-powered automation tools for import compliance and logistics operations in Mexico.

Grocery chain plans $700M supply chain expansion in South Texas 

H-E-B plans to invest $700 million to expand its supply chain operations on San Antonio’s Eastside, a project expected to create more than 1,000 jobs over the next decade, according to MySA.com.

The San Antonio-based grocery chain said the expansion could add 720 jobs by 2028 and potentially grow to more than 1,200 full-time positions in the coming years. 

Preliminary plans include construction of a new bakery, refrigerated warehouse, transportation building and additional facilities tied to H-E-B’s growing manufacturing and logistics operations.

Construction could begin later this year, with some facilities becoming operational as early as 2028, according to the report.

CPKC, CSX upgrade Southeast Mexico Express for faster transit times

CPKC and CSX have upgraded their Southeast Mexico Express (SMX) rail service with faster transit times and expanded routing options aimed at shippers moving freight between the southeastern U.S., Texas and Mexico, according to a news release.

The enhanced SMX service launched May 4 and includes a dedicated train offering truck-competitive transit times between markets such as Atlanta, Charlotte and central Florida and destinations including Dallas and Monterrey, Mexico. 

Transit improvements include approximately one-day-faster service between Atlanta and Dallas and up to 2.5 days faster service between Atlanta and central Mexico.

The upgraded service now provides two-day rail service between Atlanta and Dallas, three-day service from Monterrey and four-day service from central Mexico to Atlanta. New origin and destination points include Charlotte, Jacksonville and central Florida.

CSX (NASDAQ: CSX) and CPKC (NYSE: CP)  launched the Southeast Mexico Express in December 2024 following the railroads’ acquisitions of portions of the former Meridian & Bigbee Railroad, creating a direct interchange near Myrtlewood, Alabama.

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One week ago today, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a unanimous 9-0 decision in Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II that is already reshaping the $800-billion-plus truckload brokerage sector. The Court ruled that the Federal Aviation Administration Authorization Act (FAAAA) does not preempt state-law negligent hiring claims against brokers. In plain English: brokers can now be sued in state courts for failing to properly vet the carriers they put on the road.

I’ve spent the past seven days talking directly with brokers, shippers, carriers, technology providers, and stakeholders across the industry. The general consensus is that this is the most impactful development since trucking deregulation. 

Truckload spot rates hit new all-time high: this is not SCOTUS related, it is compliance crackdown + reindustrialization.

We are week into SCOTUS and this is what we’ve learned (all over the board tbh):

– Large brokers tell us they are getting more commitments from… pic.twitter.com/NkDq9QGk3w

— Craig Fuller (@FreightAlley) May 22, 2026

Spot Rates at Record Levels — And Still Climbing

On Thursday, truckload spot rates reached new all-time highs, even beating out the record high rates set during COVID. The SCOTUS decision may be having an impact at the margin, but the real cause is the massive compliance crackdown and resurgence of the industrial economy. 

A broader compliance crackdown has been underway for months. Reindustrialization and near-shoring trends have been pulling capacity inland. Those forces were already tightening the market. The Supreme Court’s decision removed the liability shield brokers had long relied on, but this will take months and years to work out. 

Why Unknown Carriers Carry the Highest Post-Montgomery Risk

Carrier vetting platforms and post-ruling legal analyses consistently identify the same core risk profile: a carrier with no operating history, no inspection record, and no prior relationship with the broker is the most difficult to defend as a vetting decision. The carrier may be perfectly safe, but the broker cannot demonstrate the affirmative basis for that conclusion at the time of selection. This is the core legal problem that load board sourcing creates: by its nature, the load board model brings the broker into contact with carriers it has not previously worked with.

This does not mean load boards cease to function. It does mean the operating model of load board sourcing — match a load to a carrier at the lowest cost without prior relationship — comes under direct legal scrutiny. Load board operators that build verified-identity, safety-credentialed, indemnification-backed marketplaces are positioned for the new environment. Load board models that remain neutral pipes between brokers and unknown carriers face the most direct legal pressure on their value proposition.

What I’m Hearing on the Ground

Here’s what the past week of direct conversations has shown me:

• Brokers have turned sharply more selective. Highway, a major carrier-vetting platform, told me that several large brokerages are no longer accepting loads from non-domiciled CDL drivers — a complete reversal from just seven days earlier. The risk is now simply too high.
• Shippers are nervous and reallocating freight. Several enterprise shippers have reached out because their incumbent brokers can’t secure trucks. Others have paused loading certain brokers while they reassess exposure. The most common move I’m seeing: shippers are considering shifting volume into managed transportation programs, where brokers take on more operational control and, critically, more structured risk mitigation.
• Large brokers are bullish — and gaining share. The biggest brokerage houses are ecstatic. They see this as a generational opportunity to consolidate market share. Smaller “long-tail” brokers without deep balance sheets or sophisticated risk systems will likely struggle.
• Insurance premiums are the sleeping giant. No one has final numbers yet, but early estimates I’m hearing from large brokers range from 3x to 10x increases in brokerage liability insurance. 
• Conditional safety ratings have become radioactive. Carriers sitting on FMCSA “conditional” ratings are finding it dramatically harder to get loads. The agency is overwhelmed, and the frustration from small carriers is real. Interestingly, several large, compliant asset carriers have formally asked the FMCSA for more inspections so they can clear their names more quickly and capture the capacity now being withheld from marginal players.
• Small claims are the hidden cost bomb. One asset carrier told me the real financial drag isn’t the headline-grabbing million-dollar lawsuits — it’s the volume of $20,000 nuisance claims that fall outside insurance. If brokers start getting pulled into even a fraction of those, the administrative burden could add more than $20 per load industry-wide.

We already have the first legal signal of the new reality: a broker-liability case that had been dismissed was amended this week to bring the freight broker back in as a defendant.

Winners and Losers in the New Broker-Liability Era

Winners:

• Well-capitalized, large brokers with strong risk-management systems
• Managed transportation providers
• Highly compliant, well-insured asset carriers
• Public truckload carriers and established 3PLs (I continue to believe these are the stocks to own)
• Load board operators with verified identity and indemnification-backed models

Challenged:

• Small and mid-size brokers without scale or deep insurance resources
• Non-domiciled or conditionally rated carriers
• Neutral-pipe load boards that connect brokers to unvetted carriers
• Shippers are overly reliant on spot-market capacity without robust vetting

The Bottom Line

The era of the broker as a low-liability “matchmaker” is officially over. Every load board just became a higher-stakes risk-management exercise. Capacity is tightening selectively but powerfully. Rates are already at record levels and have further to run.As one senior industry executive told me this week: “You haven’t seen anything yet.”

The post One Week After Landmark SCOTUS Ruling: Why Truckload Spot Rates Just Hit All-Time Highs — And Why This Is Only the Beginning appeared first on FreightWaves.

Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration Administrator Derek Barrs sat down with me and Matt Leffler in our Chattanooga studio this week for a live taping of Freight Expectations. What I came away with — beyond the hour of substantive policy conversation — was the clearest articulation yet of why this administration is having a measurable, real-time impact on freight markets that previous ones did not.

To view the video:

The thesis is simple. For the first time in years, the agency tasked with regulating the trucking industry is doing the job: enforcing rules already on the books, dismantling the self-certification regimes that incentivized fraud, and showing up in person where the industry actually operates. 

The market is responding accordingly. Spot rates as measured by SONAR’s National Truckload Index (NTI.USA) have moved above their COVID-era highs over the past several days.

Truckload spot rates continue to surge upward, hitting a new all-time high on the daily chart.

$3.73/mile +$.04/mile overnight.

Today is the Friday before a major holiday, and spot rates always surge, as shippers scramble for last-minute loads set to deliver on Tuesday.… pic.twitter.com/DPBpw6de5m

— Craig Fuller (@FreightAlley) May 22, 2026

That is not a coincidence. All time high records are a result of tight enforcement and a change in market direction at the hands of the regulators. 

Why this administrator resonates

Barrs is the first FMCSA administrator in my career covering this industry to be recognized by name by working truck drivers. I told him so. “I have never seen any FMCSA administrator or FMCSA period have been able to accomplish” the kind of response he and Secretary Sean Duffy received walking the Louisville truck show, I said.

His answer cut to the operating philosophy. “You have to be engaged. And when you say that you want true partnerships, you have to go where the partners are,” Barrs said. “Things do not happen sitting behind a desk. You have to be out walking. It’s kind of like managing by walking around, if you will.”

That posture extends to the field structure. “Our division administrators, they know what’s going on in their states. They know who their partners are. They know who their association members are. They’re engaged with the people that they regulate,” Barrs said. He recounted a program from his Florida Highway Patrol days putting troopers in trucks and truck drivers in patrol cars to build mutual understanding. “I want them to respect that. But then again, I also want that driver to be in the cab or in the car of that patrol car with my trooper to understand the work that they’re doing.”

The “why” behind the work is personal. Barrs described, unprompted, his earliest 911 call as a teenage dispatcher — a log truck and a passenger car on an interstate overpass that killed a young woman. He drove to the scene after his shift. “So I took the 911 call and then I also went there and then I saw what was I was hearing.” Later, as a deputy, he pulled a man out of an overturned van in pouring rain who later died at the hospital. “I learned that he was a father, he was a son, he was a husband, and he was a member of his community. And if he’d only wore a seat belt that night, he’d still be here.”

About 60% to 70% of fatalities in commercial vehicle crashes involve someone not wearing a seat belt. “My point is, this is something we’ve been talking about forever. Put your seatbelt on,” Barrs said. “We have to do a better job.”

Enforcement, not new rules, is doing the work

When I asked Barrs what success looks like, he framed it around delivery. “What keeps me up at night is making sure that we deliver. I want to make sure that we deliver on the things that we say that we’re going to do that are number one is going to enhance safety, strengthen the market, root out the bad actors so the cream will rise to the top.”

Then he made the point that every compliant carrier in this industry has been waiting to hear from a federal regulator. “If we don’t enforce the rules that we have on the books, we can add all that we want to. But if we don’t enforce the rules that we have on the books, what good are we?”

The numbers tell the story. Between 20,000 and 30,000 drivers have been placed out of service for failure to meet the English language proficiency standard since enforcement was reactivated. That standard has been on the books since 1937. It was not a new rule. It was a dormant one, and the dormancy was a choice.

Barrs walked through why the standard matters operationally. “If I’m up under a truck doing an inspection, I ask a driver to apply your brake and they start cranking up the truck because there’s not understanding exactly what that means. So, that’s a safety issue.”

International Roadcheck week wrapped last week with a combined out-of-service rate around 30% — roughly 20% on vehicles and 10% on drivers. Barrs flagged that he is seeing more acute violations during investigations now than in prior years. Brake failures. Hours-of-service violations. “If we’re seeing more acute violations and we’re constantly seeing out-of-service rates at 20% and 10% for drivers and 30 combined, that’s too many. That’s too much.”

Three and a half million roadside inspections happen every year. The argument that the industry is unregulated is wrong. The argument that the wrong things have been regulated, and that genuinely dangerous operators have been allowed to compete on price against compliant carriers, is correct. Barrs is reversing that.

Killing self-certification

When I asked Barrs what he most wanted to accomplish during his tenure, his answer was unambiguous. “When I found out we had these self-certification programs, I said, ‘Well, if we could just get rid of self-certification, I will feel that we have done something.’”

The fraud problem in trucking has always traced back to the same structural failure. ELD providers self-certify that their devices meet federal standards. Entry-level driver training (ELDT) providers self-certify that they have trained a new CDL holder competently. Substance abuse providers self-certify that they have evaluated a driver appropriately. The result has been a race to the bottom, populated heavily by overseas-controlled entities operating in regulatory gray zones.

“The self-certification pieces need to go,” Barrs said. “And of course that’s ELDs, that’s entry-level driver training. We’ve talked a lot back and forth with some of the folks about substance abuse providers where that is actually taking place as well where fraud is kind of rooting in the system.”

Matt pressed on the ELDT problem specifically — the idea that a CDL mill could certify a driver as proficient in 24 hours or two days. Barrs did not flinch: “We are, and that’s a self-certification piece, and we got to reform that. And that is on the horizon for us to get through.” He continued: “Driving a commercial vehicle and having a CDL should mean something. It should mean not that I just went down and I got them pushed out like cattle or like a candy machine. It should mean you actually have to go through a rigorous training to be able to be behind the wheel of the commercial motor vehicle.”

On the ELD ecosystem, Barrs confirmed FMCSA has active investigations with federal law enforcement partners, with attention on overseas-operated platforms that enable back-door log editing. “FMCSA is a regulatory agency. It has regulatory authorities. It doesn’t have criminal authorities. We have to work closely with our office of inspector general. We have to work with other law enforcement agencies. We have to work with Department of Justice.”

His commitment was unambiguous: “We have active investigations with our law enforcement partners on the federal level. And we will continue to go after these through investigations to determine how they’re defrauding the government, how they’re defrauding the overall industry.”

CORCA and the cargo theft problem

We spent time on cargo theft, which Barrs identified as no longer a routine cost of business but a structural threat. “This is not just a price of doing business anymore,” he said. “I think it’s way past that now.”

Matt made the legislative pitch. “There’s this thing called Combating Organized Retail Crime Act. It’s called CORCA. It’s fun to say, even more fun to explain. It has passed the House. It is in the Senate. CORCA is the single most important piece of legislation that talks about cargo theft and fraud. It creates a way for different local and state actors to collaborate on what is happening because these are criminal cartels that are doing these things.”

The bill has more than 160 bipartisan sponsors. Every major industry association supports it. As Matt put it: “From the ATA to TIA, every alphabet soup — they’re all supporting this. So that’s my pitch. Like, go do that thing.”

This is the legislation the freight industry should be calling its senators about this month.

The conditional safety rating problem

The most consistent question I received from drivers in advance of the interview was about the conditional safety rating regime. Roughly 300,000 trucks carry a conditional rating, and after the Supreme Court’s Cornejo decision opening brokers to negligent hiring liability, that rating is functioning as a scarlet letter. One driver described being assigned the rating after a single hours-of-service violation in a small fleet, and being unable to get a re-review.

Barrs acknowledged the problem directly. “We’re going to have to look at that closely. We have congressional mandates for high-risk motor carriers to have to go in and do investigations on high-risk motor carriers. And that’s what our investigators focus on.” Reviewing remediated carriers competes against that mandate for limited investigator bandwidth. “I will take that back to our team to try to figure out what that solution is going to look like.”

He also flagged a data hygiene issue underneath the headline statistic that 87% to 90% of carriers have no safety rating at all. FMCSA sent out 2.2 million letters about the MODUS registration system. “Over 400,000 letters that we sent out came back to us. So either that’s companies that are out of business, they either haven’t updated their MCS-150, they haven’t done the things that they needed to do.”

That cleanup will mechanically improve the percentage of active carriers with ratings. It does not solve the underlying problem.

Matt framed the broader implication after the Cornejo decision. “A lot of folks in the last week have said, ‘Well, the government says they’re not — they said they’re okay, they’re safe, or they don’t have a rating, therefore I should be able to book them.’ And clearly, we all know that that is not — that in itself is not a valid argument.”

There is a clear opening for private-sector audit and rating services to fill the gap that FMCSA cannot fill given its resourcing. Barrs was open to it. “We’re looking at all different ways to help us through different tools and mechanisms from the private industry to help us to identify who are our bad actors.”

Maintenance: the issue nobody is paying enough attention to

Matt pulled the conversation toward vehicle maintenance, which has been his consistent argument on the show — that the way a carrier maintains equipment is the truest signal of how it runs its business. He pointed to the international roadcheck data showing roughly 22% of commercial vehicles get placed out of service.

Barrs’s response was immediate. “For the last 20 plus years, brakes and tires. It’s the most common violation when it comes to brakes and tires.”

He framed the fix culturally. “Safety has to be number one, has to be the foundation, has to be the culture. No matter if you’re a small fleet or a large fleet, that has to be the culture.”

He invoked Admiral McRaven’s “make your bed” speech to make the point. “Small things lead to big things. If you’ll change that marker light before you when you do that pre-trip, and you check your brakes before you go, and you do a true pre-trip inspection, you do a post-trip inspection, and you make the necessary changes that need to be made — small things lead to big things.” Then: “Pick your hard. You can either pick your hard of doing on the front end, or it’s going to cost you on the back end.”

Matt’s proposed fix: doubling the FHWA’s required annual inspection to twice a year, raising minimum liability insurance from the 1985-set $750,000, and doubling FMCSA’s budget. All three require Congress.

MODUS: closing the front door

The structural fix for fraud at the registration level is MODUS. Barrs’s framing is the one to use. “I always just in layman’s terms, I like to say that it closes the front door for fraud. And we know who we’re dealing with is what I like to say. Because right now we have no way of knowing.” The system consolidates roughly nine legacy databases into a single registration platform with ID verification through IDEMIA, business verification, and the ability to track chameleon carriers across cycles of registration and de-registration.

“If you’re inactive, or say you’re a chameleon carrier, we placed you out of service, and then you try to come back into the system again, we’ll be able to understand and be able to see that data,” Barrs said.

There will be bugs. There already are bugs, and Barrs was candid that he is unapologetic about rolling out an imperfect system. “I am sorry, but I’m not sorry. This system is going to be — we knew there was going to be bugs to work through this, but you cannot fix things unless you roll it out, and let’s figure out what the bugs are.” Carriers should expect login problems in the near term and should engage anyway. MODUS is the foundation for every fraud-prevention measure that comes after.

Resources remain the binding constraint

FMCSA operates on roughly a billion-dollar budget, half of which flows to states as grants. Roughly 300 federal investigators cover an industry of more than a million motor carriers. Barrs noted, correctly, that the agency could not function without state partners. “If I and our agency did not have the support of our state partners, we’d be in bad shape. They’re just an arm of us in all 50 states.”

Adjusted for inflation, FMCSA’s allocation is down approximately 60% over the past 15 years while the carrier population has roughly doubled. The mismatch is structural and politically uncomfortable. The agency is producing measurable market impact with a fraction of the resources it had in real terms a generation ago. That is a credit to Barrs and his team. It is not a sustainable model.

When I asked whether he’d take more funding if it were offered, Barrs allowed himself a smile. “Of course I’d like to have more. But I want to make sure that we also are being very frugal with our funds. I want to make sure that we are putting our dollars where they need to be spent to make sure that they are all in a safety component that is making meaningful change.”

What this means for the freight market

The freight downturn that began in mid-2022 was driven principally by a 28% capacity expansion that arrived during a demand collapse. That overhang has been the central feature of the market for nearly three years. What we are watching now in NTI.USA and FTI.USA is the unwinding of it — not because demand has surged, but because the enforcement environment is finally pushing non-compliant capacity out of the system.

Barrs’s own framing on the market response was characteristically restrained. “I’m happy the markets are going where they’re going. I always revert back to I have to make sure that they are safe and then let that kind of work itself out, because that’s out — I can’t control a lot of that.”

He went further on the people doing the criticizing on social media. “I see comments like, ‘You’re not making a dent, you’re not doing anything.’ I do not ever want anyone — I’m not sticking my head in the sand and say we don’t have a problem. We need to address all of these issues to try to root out these bad actors.”

Higher insurance minimums, full ELDT reform, the death of ELD self-certification, MODUS at full scale, and a credible enforcement posture on English language proficiency, hours of service and vehicle maintenance — none of these have run to completion. Barrs has two and a half years left.

His closing argument was about narrative. “We can continuously say that we have bad and the people who are listening, people who are looking, will constantly say, ‘Boy, the trucking industry is bad.’ If you constantly say that teachers are bad or cops are bad or doctors are bad — guess what’s going to happen? There’s a lot of celebration that needs to be done in the trucking industry because there’s so many people who are doing a lot of really good things.”

The compliant carriers in this industry have been waiting a long time for a regulator who actually regulates. They finally have one, and the market is voting with its dollars.

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The trailer has long been a reliable but less glamorous partner in freight operations. Powered by a tractor, it was hooked, loaded and dispatched as a largely low-cost, low-technology affair until something went wrong.

Phillips Connect is betting that era is over. The Irvine, California-based smart trailer technology company announced Thursday that Mark Wallin, the principal architect of its technical roadmap and customer strategy, has been named president and general manager. The move comes as the company positions itself at the center of connected and autonomous freight.

Phillips Connect’s platform already powers daily trailer operations at several of North America’s top 10 enterprise trucking companies, according to the company. The promotion signals the company’s intent to expand that footprint as fleets demand more intelligence from every asset on the road.

Smart Trailers: Once a Differentiator, Now a Baseline

Wallin has spent the past 18 months reshaping how Phillips Connect approaches the market. This has included expanding the platform’s capabilities while lowering barriers to adoption. The strategy is part of a fundamental shift in how enterprise fleets view trailer technology.

“Smart trailer technology isn’t a nice-to-have anymore. What’s a differentiator today becomes a minimum requirement for how fleets operate tomorrow,” Wallin said. “Our job is to keep solving the real problems our customers wake up to, whether that’s tires, safety, cargo, or the shift toward autonomous freight, and to keep leading where this industry is going.”

Rob Phillips, founder and CEO, noted the appointment as both a recognition of Wallin’s contributions and a statement about where the company is headed.

“Mark is the kind of leader you build a company with,” Phillips said. “He has a rare gift for turning ambitious ideas into solutions our customers benefit from in their day-to-day work, and for building a team of remarkable people to work alongside him. We have real opportunity in front of us to define what smart trailers become for this industry, and Mark is exactly the person to lead us into it.”

Platform Expansion: From Driver Safety to Cargo Intelligence

Under Wallin’s product leadership, Phillips Connect has rolled out a series of solutions designed to make trailer intelligence actionable at every point in the operation. The company has released multiple features, from trailer health to roadside solutions, all built into a centralized platform.

DriverAssist puts trailer health information directly in drivers’ hands during pre-trip inspections and on the road. TrailerID automatically confirms the correct trailer is hooked at the moment of connection. This eliminates a common source of yard delays and dispatch errors.

CargoVision Insights delivers real-time intelligence from inside the trailer, while Roadside Safety solutions help protect drivers, cargo and nearby motorists when trailers are stopped on the shoulder. The SolarNet 8000 series, launched in late 2025, consolidates location tracking, cargo intelligence and tire pressure monitoring (TPMS) into a single solar-powered unit.

The platform aggregates data on cargo, brakes, tires, lights, liftgates, trailer identification, location and usage patterns. The goal is to give fleet operators a current and accurate picture of every trailer they run.

Wallin joined Phillips Connect in January 2024 as general manager and senior vice president of product. He brings more than two decades of product leadership across connected fleet, IoT and enterprise software-as-a-service (SaaS) markets, including senior product management roles at Verizon Connect, Telogis and Kofax. He is a member of the Forbes Technology Council and holds a bachelor’s degree in computer science and electrical engineering from Stanford University.

“I’m grateful to Rob and the team for the confidence, and I’m looking forward to what comes next,” Wallin said.

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Cloud-based spend management platform Coupa announced Wednesday it is acquiring workflow automation startup Tonkean, marking the company’s second AI-focused acquisition in less than two weeks as it expands its push into autonomous supply chain and procurement technology.

The acquisition follows Coupa’s May 12 announcement that it had acquired intelligent document processing firm Rossum during the company’s Inspire 2026 conference in Las Vegas.

Financial terms of the Tonkean deal were not disclosed.

Coupa executives said the acquisition adds advanced workflow orchestration and AI-driven automation capabilities to the company’s growing “agentic trade network,” which is aimed at automating procurement, invoicing and supplier transactions across global supply chains.

“The acquisition of Tonkean is game-changing for Coupa and the market,” Coupa CEO Leagh Turner said in a news release. “With the acquisitions of Rossum and Tonkean, in short order, we have now amassed all the assets to make this promise possible for both buyers and suppliers at a time when buying and selling is getting more complex and costly.”

Founded in 2015 and headquartered in Palo Alto, California, Tonkean developed a no-code workflow automation platform that helps enterprise procurement, legal and operations teams automate intake, approvals and internal processes using AI-powered orchestration tools.

Related: Coupa bets big on AI,  optimization as supply chains face new volatility 

Coupa said Tonkean’s technology includes more than 250 native connectors and supports multi-agent orchestration and agent-to-agent coordination, allowing enterprises to automate complex workflows without replacing existing software systems.

Executives said the platform can reduce operational cycle times by 50% and save operations teams more than 30 hours per week by eliminating manual handoffs and repetitive tasks.

The acquisition is part of a broader AI expansion strategy Coupa outlined during its Inspire 2026 conference earlier this month in Las Vegas. During the event, executives unveiled several AI-focused products, including Coupa Compose and Coupa Catalyst, while emphasizing the growing role of AI agents, orchestration and automation in supply chain management.

Coupa executives said the company has processed more than $10 trillion in cumulative spend data over the past two decades and is leveraging that dataset to build AI-native procurement and supply chain applications.

Tonkean becomes the fourth strategic acquisition tied to Coupa’s autonomous spend management strategy, following earlier acquisitions of Cirtuo, Scoutbee and Rossum.

Salvatore Lombardo, Coupa’s chief product and technology officer, said the company is building what it describes as the “#1 agentic trade network.”

“With Tonkean natively embedded in Coupa, customers get best-in-class orchestration and the best spend platform they already trust, in a single, unified agentic architecture,” Lombardo said in a statement.

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LAS VEGAS — AI-powered analytics and digital supply chain modeling are reshaping network optimization and scenario planning across manufacturing operations, according to Marianna Vydrevich, supply chain network design & optimization expert at GAF.

Vydrevich said AI tools are helping supply chain teams automate data engineering workflows and reduce dependence on IT departments for routine analytics tasks.

“It’s really an enhancement of capabilities,” Vydrevich told FreightWaves in an interview at the Coupa Inspire 2026 conference on May 13. “The main enhancement so far has been on the data engineering front.”

GAF is one of North America’s largest manufacturers of residential and commercial roofing and waterproofing materials, operating more than 30 locations across the continent. The company is headquartered in Parsippany, New Jersey.

Coupa Inspire 2026, held May 11 through May 13 at ARIA Resort & Casino in Las Vegas, brought together hundreds of procurement, finance and supply chain executives focused on spend management, sourcing and supply chain technology. 

Coupa is a cloud-based, AI-native platform designed for total spend management and supply chain optimization.

Related: ‘AI is the new UI’: Coupa customers race to automate supply chains 

Vydrevich said AI has already become ‘an absolute game changer’ for business analytics and data engineering workflows.

Vydrevich said AI delivers the greatest value in analytics-heavy functions such as inventory optimization, procurement classification and supply chain scenario analysis. 

Vydrevich said AI’s role in supply chain network optimization is more complicated than simple text generation or basic automation because it requires digital models that closely mirror real-world supply chains.

“Doing network design, applying AI to network design is a higher bar than for other tasks,” she said. “You’re creating a digital twin which might not have all the exact details as your actual supply chain because it’s a model.”

She also highlighted Coupa’s Navi AI assistant as a tool capable of acting like a “junior modeler” to help analysts interpret network changes and operational bottlenecks.

“A lot of people are misusing it,” Vydrevich said of some enterprise AI adoption. “They’re trying to apply it to the wrong use cases.”

Vydrevich also predicted that coding and data engineering knowledge will become foundational skills for future supply chain professionals.

“Every office job will require it; every person will need to understand the basics of data engineering,” she said. “Like it was with coding 10 years ago.”

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