FreightWaves

Overview

FreightWaves is a Chattanooga, Tennessee-based company built on the thesis that freight markets deserve their own Bloomberg: high-frequency supply-and-demand data sold as a SaaS product, paired with a data-driven media operation (Hypepotamus). Founded in 2016 by Craig Fuller, it raised more than $76 million in venture funding before Fuller split the company in two in early 2024 — the SONAR data business stayed with FreightWaves Inc. while the media arm, comprising some 35 titles, was spun off into a new entity called Firecrown (Splash247, Dalton State University).

A publication built to sell a data product

FreightWaves did not start as a media company with a data side project — it was the reverse. When Fuller started the freight publication, he was focused on educating the market about his other startup, TransRisk, whose market-data analytics and tracking dashboard was described as akin to a Bloomberg Terminal (Hypepotamus). “It was intended to basically educate the market about the idea that [our product is] viable, that we are going to create data analytics and risk management products, and to help us to gain exposure,” Fuller said (Hypepotamus). The publication, launched in March 2017, picked up steam on its own: after hiring a full editorial staff and practicing data-driven journalism informed by the company’s market insights, it became the most-trafficked publication in the freight market, with nearly twice the audience of any comparable outlet (Hypepotamus). The TransRisk name was eventually folded under FreightWaves (Hypepotamus).

Fuller came to the business with deep roots in the industry. His father started what Hypepotamus describes as the largest privately held trucking company in the United States out of the family’s hometown of Chattanooga, and Splash247 identifies Fuller as the son of the founder of US Xpress, a trucking firm (Hypepotamus, Splash247). Before FreightWaves, Fuller’s first entrepreneurial venture was a logistics software startup (Hypepotamus).

The SONAR data business

The core product is SONAR, a SaaS dashboard that crunches high-frequency freight-market data — prices, demand, and capacity — to give brokers, carriers, shippers, and financial traders insight into market conditions and future trends (Hypepotamus). A 2019 Hypepotamus report called it the first, and at the time the only, data and analytics platform for freight markets, again drawing the Bloomberg-terminal comparison (Hypepotamus). Dalton State University, which partnered with the company academically, describes SONAR as tracking trends across 135 U.S. markets, noting that most shipping decisions are made within 48 hours, which makes up-to-date data critical (Dalton State University). Splash247 describes SONAR as a freight-market intelligence platform offering near-real-time trucking, railroad, ocean, and air freight transportation data (Splash247).

The data ambitions extended beyond dashboards. FreightWaves planned the first financially settled trucking freight futures contracts — a tradable futures marketplace intended to let shippers, carriers, and brokers hedge against rapid price fluctuations — and, with seven other companies, led the formation of the Blockchain in Transport Alliance (BiTA), a trade group for blockchain standards in freight that drew 1,700 membership applications in its early phase (Hypepotamus, Hypepotamus).

Funding and the media empire

The venture backing arrived quickly. FreightWaves raised a $3.4 million seed round in October 2017 led by Fontinalis Partners, the mobility-focused firm led by Bill Ford of the Ford Motor Company, and joined the first cohort of the Engage corporate accelerator in Atlanta (Hypepotamus). In 2018 it closed an oversubscribed $13 million Series A led by logistics-focused 8VC, with Fontinalis Partners, Story Ventures, Pritzker Group Venture Capital, and Revolution’s Rise of the Rest Seed Fund participating, bringing total funding to $18.4 million (Hypepotamus). At the time the company reported a $7 million revenue run rate and expected to roughly double it by year-end (Hypepotamus).

The $21 million Series B in early 2019 was led by existing investor 8VC and brought in corporate venture arms Hearst Ventures and Prologis Ventures along with former Tennessee U.S. Senator Bob Corker, with every prior institutional investor participating again (Hypepotamus). Fuller projected the year would close at a $30 million revenue run rate (Hypepotamus). The media business, meanwhile, was syndicated across more than 70 publications including Yahoo Finance and Benzinga, generating a claimed one billion potential impressions per day, and had launched a satellite-radio show with an over-the-top freight television network planned (Hypepotamus). In 2019 the company acquired American Shipper, the maritime publication founded by David A. Howard and first published in May 1974 (Splash247).

The 2024 split: media versus data

In early 2024 Fuller divided the empire. The media businesses were spun off into a new entity named Firecrown, with the stated rationale of letting the FreightWaves SONAR team concentrate on scaling its SaaS platform without the complexities of media operations (Splash247). Firecrown was set to house media entities covering maritime, trucking, aviation, and boating — including American Shipper — totaling some 35 titles (Splash247). Fuller was candid about the financial logic: “Media, I’m sure you appreciate this, is not something that investors chase, but SaaS is different. It’s highly desired by private equity and strategics, not to mention IPO,” and a combined entity would fetch a far lower price than a pure-play SaaS business (Splash247). He said he had no immediate plans to sell but acknowledged investors wanted to maximize enterprise value, adding: “As a venture-backed tech company, you always know that the business is going to recap or IPO, it’s the way the model works” (Splash247). The media business itself, which he now owned outright, he described as a cash-flowing “lifestyle business” he did not intend to sell (Splash247).

Academic footprint

Beyond the trade press, FreightWaves left an academic footprint. Dalton State University’s Wright School of Business signed a memorandum of understanding with the company to strengthen its Logistics and Supply Chain Management program, with faculty and students trained on the SONAR platform and given access to the company’s events; the school also joined BiTA for research and education (Dalton State University). The university describes FreightWaves as having secured more than $76 million in funding and employing more than 130 workers, and notes the company’s FreightTech Innovation Challenge, a team-based student competition (Dalton State University).

What this profile does not claim

This profile does not resolve whether “founded in 2016” (Dalton State, Splash247) or “launched in March 2017” (Hypepotamus) is the better founding date — the former likely refers to the company and the latter to the publication, but no source says so explicitly. The exact publish dates of the three Hypepotamus articles are approximated from internal evidence and documented in their source notes. Figures from the undated Dalton State page ($76M+ raised, 130+ employees, 135 markets) are treated as early-2020s snapshots, not current facts. An unverified claim of a June 2026 U.S. Department of Transportation contract for SONAR data appeared only in a directory-style listing and is deliberately excluded. Nothing is stated about the SONAR business or Firecrown after the February 2024 split, as no independent sources covering that period were found in this pass.