BlueCargo Named a 2025 Top Tech Startup in Supply Chain Technology

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Freight audit was historically treated as a back-office accounting task, addressed after costs were incurred and disconnected mainly from operations. In 2025, that model no longer reflects the realities of global supply chains. Rising accessorial charges, sustained margin pressure, and heightened oversight of freight spend have repositioned freight audit as a critical control point spanning logistics, finance, and procurement.

That reality is central to why Food Logistics and Supply & Demand Chain Executive named BlueCargo a 2025 Top Tech Startup. The recognition reflects the company’s application of artificial intelligence to a persistent and costly challenge in containerized logistics: achieving timely, verifiable control over freight charges at scale.

The award recognizes the work BlueCargo has done over time: building a freight spend management platform, then using AI to make that system more accurate, faster to operate, and easier for teams to trust.

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Built Before the Hype, Enhanced With AI

BlueCargo was founded in 2018 and launched its first public-facing platform in 2020, initially focused on helping shippers manage and dispute detention and demurrage charges. At the time, the problem was narrow but acute: opaque fees, inconsistent billing, and limited recourse once costs were incurred.

As customers’ needs expanded, so did the platform. In late 2023, BlueCargo broadened its scope beyond detention and demurrage into a managed service covering additional accessorial fees.

By 2024, the platform supported audit and management of the full range of accessorial charges associated with international containerized shipments, and its next phase was built with an AI-first design to handle the growing scale and complexity of freight data.

As the platform expanded, freight costs increasingly reflected fragmented data across carriers, terminals, vendors, and internal teams, exposing the limits of manual review.

In mid-2024, BlueCargo began introducing AI-driven automation to strengthen accessorial audits, followed by the broader freight audit and transportation spend management system customers use today. AI was applied selectively to improve accuracy and consistency across multiple sources of truth.

The intent was not to redefine the product, but to reinforce a platform built to manage freight spend at scale.

At TPM 2025, BlueCargo announced its expansion of these capabilities with AI applications and AI agents designed to improve audit accuracy further and reduce manual friction. By operating across multiple validated data sources, the platform helps teams cut through noise that traditionally slows down freight cost verification.

As Alexandra Griffon, co-founder and CEO of BlueCargo, explained during her TPM25 interview with JOC, the goal is not automation for automation’s sake:

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“AI only creates value in logistics when it cuts through complexity instead of adding to it. Our focus has always been on clarity, accuracy, and helping teams act on the right information at the right time.”

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Freight Audit as Freight Spend Management

BlueCargo earned the Top Tech Startup 2025 recognition by broadening its approach to freight audit to a comprehensive international freight spend management.

Most freight audit tools focus narrowly on reviewing invoices after payment or isolating a single fee category. BlueCargo was built to manage everything tied to international transportation spend, including:

➤ Drayage and ocean freight

➤ Accessorial charges, including detention and demurrage

➤ Vendor billing, statements of account, and payment readiness

➤ The financial handoff between logistics, procurement, and finance

This broader scope lets teams see freight costs clearly across vendors, routes, shipments, and charge types. It also simplifies GL coding and reduces payment delays caused by incomplete or inconsistent invoices.

Over time, this creates consistent control over transportation spend.

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Why Financial Leverage Matters

Freight spend management carries an outsized financial impact, especially in industries with tight margins.

For a typical Beneficial Cargo Owner or shipper, the average gross profit margin is approximately 8%. At that margin level, every $1 saved in procurement is equivalent to roughly $12 in net new sales. That leverage is what makes freight audit and spend management strategically important, not administratively convenient.

This matters even more because approximately one-third of international freight spend is on accessorial fees. These charges are often unplanned, poorly explained, and treated as a black box by shippers. Without a structured system to manage them, costs compound quietly.

BlueCargo’s focus on freight spend management is grounded in a simple philosophy often repeated internally: take care of the small costs, and the larger financial outcomes take care of themselves.

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What This Signals for Supply Chain Technology

Artificial intelligence has moved out of pilot programs and into day-to-day operations. Research from Gartner and McKinsey shows that AI is now embedded in core operational systems, delivering measurable improvements in cost control, productivity, and decision quality, particularly in complex, high-volume environments.

Logistics is a clear example. Despite accounting for roughly 9.5% of the U.S. workforce, the sector has historically represented only about 0.3% of AI adoption. BlueCargo’s work sits directly at that intersection, bringing applied AI into one of the most cost-sensitive and operationally complex parts of the supply chain.

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Recognized as ‘Tech Startup of the Year’
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“We are honored to receive the ‘Tech Startup of the Year’ recognition from Food Logistics and Supply & Demand Chain Executive,” says Alexandra Griffon, co-founder and CEO of BlueCargo.

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The recognition reflects the scope of the problem BlueCargo was built to address. Rather than focusing on a single fee type or a post-payment audit task, BlueCargo was designed to manage international transportation spend across vendors, cost categories, and internal teams. By linking freight charges directly to how shipments move through the supply chain and applying AI to improve accuracy across fragmented data sources, the platform allows companies to manage freight costs as a complete system.

For shippers, this means freight costs can be reviewed, understood, and managed as a whole rather than addressed one invoice or fee at a time. That shift changes how organizations control spend, resolve discrepancies, and plan for future costs.

BlueCargo gave shippers a way to control international transportation costs with consistency and confidence.

Not one fee.

Not one invoice.

But the full financial picture, starting with the container.

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Learn More

Official Press Release HERE

Watch Alexandra Griffon’s TPM25 interview with JOC:

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