Executive Summary
Mid-market warehouses still schedule dock appointments by phone and email. The consequence is measurable: the average 150K sq ft facility loses roughly $146K per year to carrier detention fees and idle dock labor, and 38% of appointments arrive more than 30 minutes off schedule. Enterprise yard management systems exist, but they start at six figures with multi-quarter rollouts, leaving roughly 19,500 US facilities unserved.
Freightlane is a scheduling layer that goes live in two weeks. Warehouses publish door capacity; carriers book slots against it for free through a web portal, with geofenced ETAs and a check-in kiosk feeding a live yard view. Automatic dwell-time records give operators the evidence to dispute detention fees, which is typically where the product pays for itself in the first month.
We charge a flat $850 per facility per month ($10.2K ACV) at 79% gross margin, with an 11-month CAC payback. We are raising $2.5M to reach 120 facilities and $1.22M ARR within 18 months, at which point the business is prepared for a Series A on the strength of a repeatable mid-market motion and a growing two-sided carrier network.
Market Analysis
Size and segmentation
Dock and yard software is a $2.4B global market today, growing 14% annually as shippers push scheduling requirements down their carrier networks. Our serviceable market is the US mid-market: 19,500 warehouses between 50K and 500K sq ft, none of which can justify an enterprise yard management system. At our $10.2K ACV, fully penetrated that segment is worth $610M in annual revenue (SAM). Our five-year objective is 10% of it, a $61M SOM.
Why now
- Detention enforcement tightened. The 2024 FMCSA detention-time rulemaking made dwell records commercially valuable to both sides of every appointment.
- Carriers are already digital. ELD mandates put a connected device in every cab; geofenced ETAs no longer require carrier-side hardware or training.
- Labor cost pressure. Warehouse wages rose 23% since 2021, making an idle dock crew a line item operators now track weekly.
Competitive landscape
The incumbent in most facilities is a phone, a shared inbox, and a spreadsheet. Among software vendors, Opendock targets enterprise networks with per-dock pricing, and C3 Solutions sells full yard management suites with multi-quarter implementations. Both charge carriers for access. Freightlane's wedge is structural: the carrier side is free forever, so every facility we sign recruits its carrier base onto the platform, and those carriers then push their other warehouses toward us. Since our fourth month, every new account has originated from that inbound loop.
Go-to-Market Strategy
Land: the detention audit
Our outbound motion opens with a free detention audit: we ingest 90 days of gate logs and invoices and hand the operations manager a dollar figure for what phone scheduling cost them last quarter. The audit converts at 31% to a paid pilot because it names a number the buyer already suspects. Sales cycle averages 34 days; the champion is the site operations manager and the signer is the regional VP of operations.
Expand: the carrier flywheel
Every appointment booked adds carriers to the network. When a carrier dispatcher uses Freightlane at one facility and phone-tag at another, they lobby the laggard. We instrument this: dispatchers can send a one-click request that a facility adopt Freightlane, and those requests are our highest-converting lead source at effectively zero CAC. Blended CAC is $7.4K with an 11-month payback; as the flywheel share of pipeline grows, modeled CAC declines through the projection period.
Pricing and packaging
- Core, $850/mo per facility: scheduling, carrier portal, yard view, dwell records.
- Analytics add-on (FY2028): lane benchmarking and detention recovery workflows, priced at $250/mo, driving net revenue retention from 108% toward 115%.
- Carriers: free, permanently. This is a strategic commitment, not an introductory offer.
Operations
Team and hiring plan
We are 9 people today: 5 engineering, 2 go-to-market, 2 operations, led by a founding team that has lived both sides of the dock (Maya Reyes ran dock operations for 11 facilities at Flexport; Daniel Okafor built ETA infrastructure at Samsara; Sarah Kim built project44's mid-market sales motion). The seed plan grows headcount to 14 by end of FY2027 and 26 by end of FY2028, weighted toward account executives and onboarding engineers, the two roles that gate facility count.
Onboarding as an assembly line
Two-week deployment is a product promise, so onboarding is run as a documented assembly line: door-capacity modeling on day 1, carrier import and invitations by day 4, kiosk hardware shipped preconfigured, and a go-live checklist owned by a named onboarding engineer. Current median time-to-first-booked-appointment is 9 days, and each onboarding engineer carries 6 concurrent deployments.
Infrastructure and support
The platform is a multi-tenant SaaS on commodity cloud infrastructure; COGS is dominated by hosting, SMS/ETA data, and kiosk hardware amortization, which is how gross margin holds at 79% and improves to 81% with scale. Support runs 6am to 8pm Central (dock hours), staffed from the operations team, with a 42-minute median first response today.
Financial Projections
The model below assumes the seed closes in Q4 2026, ACV holds at $10.2K on the core product with the analytics add-on layering in from FY2028, and the carrier flywheel keeps blended CAC flat while sales headcount scales. Recognized revenue trails exit ARR because facilities land throughout each year.
| Line item | FY2027 | FY2028 | FY2029 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Scale | |||
| Paying facilities (year end) | 120 | 340 | 780 |
| Exit ARR | 1,224 | 3,468 | 7,956 |
| Net revenue retention | 108% | 112% | 115% |
| Headcount (year end) | 14 | 26 | 42 |
| Income statement | |||
| Recognized revenue | 840 | 2,460 | 5,900 |
| Cost of revenue | 176 | 517 | 1,121 |
| Gross profit | 664 | 1,943 | 4,779 |
| Gross margin | 79% | 79% | 81% |
| Operating expenses | |||
| Sales and marketing | 1,100 | 2,050 | 3,350 |
| Research and development | 1,290 | 1,780 | 2,380 |
| General and administrative | 450 | 700 | 1,010 |
| Total operating expenses | 2,840 | 4,530 | 6,740 |
| EBITDA | (2,176) | (2,587) | (1,961) |
Exit ARR = facilities x $10.2K core ACV; add-on revenue is reflected in NRR and recognized revenue.
Cumulative EBITDA burn across the three years is $6.7M, funded by the $2.5M seed through mid-FY2028 and a planned Series A thereafter. The FY2029 trajectory, 81% gross margin against decelerating opex growth, points to EBITDA breakeven in FY2030 without further pricing changes.
Risks and Mitigations
Incumbent moves downmarket
High impactOpendock or C3 could launch a simplified mid-market tier and compete on brand.
Mitigation: the free carrier side is a pricing structure incumbents cannot copy without breaking their enterprise revenue model; we compound the network before they can reprice.
Flywheel underperforms outside the beachhead
Medium impactCarrier-driven inbound may weaken in regions where our facility density is low.
Mitigation: expansion is sequenced by carrier-lane adjacency, not geography; the detention audit provides a paid-CAC channel that works with zero network density.
Freight recession compresses budgets
Medium impactA prolonged soft freight market delays discretionary software purchases.
Mitigation: the product is sold as cost recovery, not growth; detention disputes and labor savings get more attention, not less, in a down cycle. NRR held at 108% through the 2025 soft market.
Onboarding fails to scale
Low impactTwo-week deployment could slip as volume triples, damaging the core promise.
Mitigation: onboarding is instrumented per step with a 6-deployment cap per engineer; hiring triggers fire at 80% capacity, two quarters ahead of modeled demand.
The Ask
We are raising a $2.5M seed for 24 months of runway: 45% engineering, 35% go-to-market, 20% operations. The round funds the hiring plan in Section 4 and carries the company to 120 facilities and $1.22M exit ARR at month 18, with NRR above 110% as the analytics add-on ships. Those metrics, plus a documented, repeatable onboarding assembly line, are the Series A story.