Today's Pickup: Canadian Startup To Offer Its Load Board For Free

Good Day,

A startup attempting to shake up Canada's freight market plans to offer its newly launched load board for free to speed up adoption.

The Canadian Load Board will make the core version of its namesake platform free of charge on September 9, two months after launching.

"We hope that the free version will bring big benefits to the network by drawing more users," CEO Aidan Slack-Watkins said.

The load board launched with a base price of C$98 (a Canadian dollar equals US$0.75), challenging the dominance of TransCore's Loadlink, owned by DAT's parent company, Roper Technologies ROP.

But the adoption has been slow, with only a handful of loads posted per day, which he blamed on a weak spot market. 

"It hasn't accelerated as quickly as we thought it would," Slack-Watkins said.

Did you know? 

Perishable airfreight imports are expected to grow by 5 to 7 percent this year in the United Arab Emirates, according to DHL.

Quotable:

"The criminal charges filed against Anthony relate exclusively to LiDAR and do not in any way involve Pronto's ground-breaking technology."

– Pronto.AI on the criminal charges against founder CEO Anthony Levandowski, accused of stealing documents from his former employer, Google. 

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Final thoughts

The Canadian Load Board's competitor, Transcore's LoadLink, hosted just over 340,000 loads in July. As the standard-bearer for the Canadian market for nearly 30 years, LoadLink's dominance may prove difficult to challenge. But The Canadian Load Board's aggressive pricing strategy just made things more interesting. 

Hammer down everyone!

Image Sourced from Pixabay