When a trucking company's software starts misbehaving, somebody says "call Paul." He's spent more than a decade consulting on the biggest transportation management system in North America, untangling the EDI workflows that keep freight moving and carriers paid. He knows the software, he knows the workarounds, and he knows exactly what all of it costs.
"I'm not a developer by trade," Paul said. "I'm more like a solution architect." Keep that in mind for what comes next.
Paul has spent his career inside the transportation industry's software problems, not just watching them from the outside. That's what makes TradeWeave, the EDI platform he built with his two sons, different from the tools it's replacing.
$70K for dated EDI software
Here's the bill Paul's clients were living with. The industry-standard EDI software, Dell Boomi, runs about $70,000 a year. That doesn't include someone like Paul to configure it. Transactions route through third-party networks that charge by file size, which sounds fine until you ask what a file costs. "It's always a question mark," Paul said, "because no one really knows how many bits a file is."
Then his clients started asking about modern API connections, so Paul asked the vendor. "They said, that's a $20,000 a year license."
And the meter only runs one direction: SaaS prices rose 16.4% year over year as of June 2026, almost 4x US inflation (Vertice). Missing features? You could report them to the vendor. Sometimes they'd offer to build the fix, for a price. Paul's clients were paying enterprise prices to rent software that still needed a customization layer to meet their needs.
The PDF that started it
The first crack in the wall wasn't EDI at all. Paul uploaded a shipping PDF to an AI chatbot and asked it to pull out the shipper, consignee, and freight details. It did. Huh.
He went looking for a tool that could turn that trick into software, found Bolt.new, and built a document-processing app that fixed a daily headache in his clients' workflows. About ten of them still use it today. So the next thought came naturally: if an AI could read freight paperwork, could it build the thing his industry had been overpaying for since the '90s?
Two days into the TradeWeave build, he had his answer.
Suddenly, a software company
TradeWeave does what the $70K tool does, at about half the price, with features Paul always wished the incumbent had. He built it the way he advises clients: telling the AI how it needed to work and how it needed to look, feeding it screenshots of software he liked.
Then the company kept accidentally growing. They needed support ticketing, and the off-the-shelf options ran $30 or $40 a month, so they built their own in Bolt.new. Same for the licensing system. Same for a deployment tool that compares their dev version against each customer's version and pushes updates automatically. A KPI dashboard for carriers is in beta with two customers now.
Every piece exists because they needed it, which puts them at odds with how the industry usually buys software: organizations leave an average of 36% of their SaaS licenses sitting unused (Zylo). TradeWeave's stack has no shelf.
Each customer gets their own database and their own repository, and the whole operation runs on entry-level infrastructure.
All of this is run by Paul and his sons. It's a boutique operation for a goliath industry.
"We won't outsource anything."
Expertise and precision
TradeWeave has about eight customers, six of them big carriers coming off legacy systems, the kind that ran on-premise and needed Citrix just to open a dashboard. Now their dispatchers log in from anywhere. And when a customer wishes the software did something differently, they don't file a request into a vendor's void.
"One or two prompts later, I can say, hey, go try this out. To do that somewhere in another environment is unheard of."
One prospect passed on TradeWeave, and it wasn't the product. They loved the product. They just didn't think the company was big enough. Paul's answer to that is basically the whole story: "We have tools that allow us to be smaller, leaner, and you're now getting experts that talk to you every time. Not someone new that doesn't know transportation or doesn't know EDI."
Small, on purpose
TradeWeave's entire headcount is a father and his sons. Paul's oldest builds alongside him. His youngest, a software development student in Vancouver, spent the summer doing EDI mapping between semesters. In September, Paul's walking a transportation trade show floor with no booth, because after a decade in the industry he doesn't need one to find customers.
The longer plan is the quietly ambitious one: get the training materials to the point where a carrier's own IT team can run TradeWeave without Paul at all. Mobile apps are next on the list.
Small means a customer request on Tuesday is live by Wednesday. Domain expertise is the moat, something you only earn through time in the trenches. And it's exactly what Paul says the big vendors' developers lack: "A lot of time those people that are building that software really aren't out there in the real world, working with these customers and working with these workflows where we are."
Paul is building something durable and modern for an industry whose technology has been running on fumes for years.
The prospect who worried they were too small had it wrong. Small is the whole point.
