A Broken Industry
Meet Zach Meiborg.
Zach is the owner and CEO of Meiborg Brothers, a nine-figure carrier, brokerage, and 3PL based in Rockford, Illinois. His operation is complex and relentless. Constant deadlines. Razor-thin margins. Hundreds of assets moving thousands of loads across the country every week.
Zach knows that staying ahead of the chaos requires the best software. And he pays for it — $1.4
million a year, spread across his technology stack.
Here’s what Zach gets for $1.4 million.
Outdated products. Generic interfaces. Zero customization. Clunky workflows. Tools that don’tintegrate. And vendors who know it — vendors who know Zach can’t easily switch (migrating off a TMS is brutal) and have priced their complacency into the contract.
His TMS alone runs $500,000+ a year. He spends another $220,000 a year on customer support contracts and outside consultants just to keep it from crashing.
$1.4 million a year. 20 systems. Predatory vendors who don’t care. Outdated technology. Zero results.
If you run a brokerage or carrier, this story probably sounds familiar.
This is the trucking software industry’s open secret: vendors don’t have to be good. They just have to be sticky
The market is built on switching costs. Once you’re integrated, getting out means months of downtime, six-figure migrations, and retraining your back office. The vendors know it. So they don’t innovate. They don’t customize. They don’t care whether you succeed.
Right now when carriers and brokers choose a software vendor, they don’t get a partner. They get a vulture
A Real Partner
We didn’t start Hemut to be the next vulture. We’re here to burn that model to the ground.
We built Hemut around four commitments that flip the vendor model on its head.
1. We forward-deploy engineers into your operation.
When a client signs with Hemut, we don’t ship them a login and a help desk number. We send an engineering team to their office. They sit with dispatchers, ride along with drivers, watch how loads actually get built. They diagnose what’s broken. They work with the client to design the vision for what their software should look like. They build it. They deploy it. They train the team until adoption is complete. And if something breaks, they get back on a plane. That’s not customer success. That’s how a real partner shows up.
2. We build custom for every client.
Every operation runs differently — different equipment, different lanes, different customers, different constraints. So every Hemut deployment gets shaped to the operation it lives in. The platform is shared; the configuration is yours.
3. We guarantee outcomes.
Most software vendors get paid when you sign. We get paid when you win. No invoicing until our clients are fully adopted and succeeding on the platform. If we can’t get you live and producing results, we don’t get a check.
Same incentive as the client. Same dollar on the line.
4. We integrate the full stack.
The twenty-system stack doesn’t exist at a Hemut client. Marketplace, dispatch, tracking, fleet management, accounting, brokerage workflows, SDR engine — built into one platform, designed to work together from day one. Modular if you want pieces. Whole if you want the full thing. Either way: no integration tax, no system-of-record fragmentation, no $220k consultant retainer just to keep the thing running.
That bet only works if you can build at a speed the industry hasn’t seen before.
That’s a partner. Not a vendor pretending.
Built Different
How does a brand-new startup ship a six-product platform in a year?
It doesn’t think like a startup.
Most early-stage companies pick a wedge. They drive into one narrow problem, win a slice, and slowly expand from there. We made the opposite bet. We attack every part of the problem at once, because that’s what trucking actually needs — and because the data flowing between Command, Core, Forge, Reach, Custom, and Diesel makes every product in the stack smarter than it could ever be alone. Our clients don’t get a tool. They get a system that compounds on itself the longer they run on it
How does a brand-new startup ship a six-product platform in a year?
So that’s what we built first — the team.
We come from Stanford. Waterloo. Yale. USC. UCLA. We’ve shipped at Bain, Bank of America, Uber, Meta, CrowdStrike. We don’t show up to work — we live the work. Same house. Same kitchen. Same gym. Same desks. We sleep, eat, train, travel, and ship together. Every waking hour points at this company.
That’s how we ship daily. That’s how we run a forward-deployed engineering model that puts our team inside our clients’ operations and pulls live feedback into the codebase every day. That’s how we religiously use Cursor, Claude, and the best development tools in the industry to move at a pace incumbents can’t match. And that’s how we hit 16 hours a day, 7 days a week, whatever it takes.
It takes a team that doesn’t want a job. It takes a team that wants this.
That’s the team. And right now, that team is closing our first full enterprise rollout, and preparing to roll out at four other enterprise carriers and brokerages.
The Bet
The vulture model is dying.
The incumbents built their businesses on switching costs and bloat. They priced complacency into their contracts and dared their customers to leave. For thirty years, that worked. It doesn’t work anymore.
Within five years, every serious carrier and brokerage in this country is going to run on AI-native software. Not bolted onto a legacy TMS. Not stitched together from twenty vendors. One platform, one partner, built by people who actually understand the operation.
The vendors who got fat on lock-in aren’t going to make that transition. The companies that earn this market are going to be the ones who embed with their clients, build custom for every operation, integrate the full stack, and put their own dollar on the line for every outcome.
That’s the partner era. It’s already starting.
Hemut is going to define it.
49,211 hours.
Spent watching what’s broken. Spent building what isn’t.
The vendor era is over. The partner era is here. If you’re ready to see what software actually working for you looks like, the door’s open.
— Hemut Team
