ST: After Seattle startup Convoy fails, drivers wait for pay and answers

THE SEATTLE TIMES reports:

Like many of the small-time truckers who bet big on Convoy, the Seattle freight startup that failed last fall, Angadjot Sandhu didn’t realize the ride was over until it was too late.

Sandhu, 37, started using Convoy in 2020 to find jobs for Mountview Transport, his one-rig trucking business in Kent. Convoy’s app, a kind of Uber for cargo, let Sandhu bid on freight from local companies more efficiently and often at a better price than through traditional freight brokers. 

Within a year, Sandhu was so busy hauling Convoy loads that he bought a second truck and hired a second driver. By last October, Sandhu, a tall, soft-spoken Punjabi immigrant who also works on his family’s Central Washington commercial orchards, had five trucks, $500,000 in annual revenue and his own truck yard in Auburn. Convoy, he says, “was a revolution in the industry.”

It was a common reaction for many of the hundreds of thousands of truckers who were swept up in Convoy’s ambitious plan to digitally disrupt the century-old system of truck freight.

On Oct. 17, the Convoy revolution collapsed. 

Late that evening, Convoy began canceling Sandhu’s scheduled loads, one after another. Sandhu told his drivers not to worry. He had contracts with Convoy. He knew Convoy employees and had even visited its posh headquarters in downtown Seattle. “They’re a multimillion-dollar company,” Sandhu told himself…

The full post can be found here.