If you’re wondering why logistics still looks like phone calls and spreadsheets in 2026, the answer is size and fragmentation.
Global logistics is roughly an $11T+ market. U.S. trucking alone is around $900B+ annually. Yet the system is deeply inefficient: about 16–17% of truck miles are empty, average load factors are around 57%, and a huge portion of loads move partially empty. The industry is also structurally fragmented, with about 91.5% of carriers operating 10 trucks or fewer. That makes coordination hard and tech adoption slow.
That’s why disruption arrived late here compared to fintech or advertising. You’re not digitizing a payment. You’re coordinating thousands of small operators across geography, time windows, warehouse constraints, driver hours, and constantly changing demand.
The reason this becomes a tailwind for names like RIME is simple: late disruption tends to accelerate once it starts. When pressures stack (fuel, labor, service expectations, emissions scrutiny), “good enough” manual coordination stops being survivable. That’s when orchestration platforms go from “interesting” to “needed.”
And once an industry this large starts modernizing for real, small share gains can represent very large dollars.