How a freight tech veteran saw the gap, and why Ship Angel is built differently
The logistics world has always been complex. But for decades, the pain of that complexity has fallen hardest on one group: shippers.
At Ship Angel, we’re not just solving that problem — we were built for it. And to understand what makes us different, it helps to know where we started.
Before founding Ship Angel, our CEO Graham Parker spent six years building Kontainers — a SaaS platform that helped freight forwarders digitize their workflows. The company scaled fast, served nearly a quarter of the world’s top 25 freight brands, and eventually exited to Descartes.
But in those high-growth years, Graham kept seeing the same thing: while forwarders were getting digital tools, shippers — the ones footing the bill — were left behind.
Shippers had limited visibility. Disjointed rate files. Manual workflows. And a tech landscape built for everyone but them. That imbalance stuck with him.
So when Graham stepped away from Kontainers, he knew his next move had to be different. This time, he wasn’t building for the middlemen. He was building for the people who move global trade forward — and deserve better tools to do it.
Ship Angel exists for one customer only: shippers.
We don’t serve freight forwarders. We don’t split our roadmap. And we don’t water down our vision to try and please everyone. That clarity is a big part of what makes our platform so powerful.
By focusing exclusively on BCOs, we’ve built something purpose-driven and incredibly fast — not stitched together from legacy systems or white-labeled vendor tech. Every feature, every update, every model we train is tuned for shipper use cases.
The supply chain world has a new favorite buzzword: AI. But here’s the uncomfortable truth — many platforms claiming to be AI-powered are really just hiding BPO centers behind shiny interfaces.
We don’t do that. Ship Angel’s AI engine is built in-house from the ground up, specifically for rate management. No off-the-shelf shortcuts. No outsourced workflows.
That means our system doesn't just ingest data — it understands it. From surfacing cost discrepancies to proactively flagging risky contract terms, our models help shippers move faster, cut waste, and regain control of their global freight spend.
One enterprise customer saw over $1.8M in cost savings in just their first two quarters with Ship Angel. Not by slashing rates — but by getting ahead of bad contracts, improving team coordination, and identifying invoice leakage early.
We're not a quiet company. We question everything. We move quickly. And we don’t wait around for industry norms to catch up before launching something better.
That mindset is embedded in our culture. It’s how we’ve been able to ship at a pace that outmatches companies 10x our size — and why shippers who work with us describe the experience as "frictionless," "shockingly fast," and "the first real tech we've seen in freight in a long time."
But we’re just getting started.
Ship Angel was born from a gap — a giant one — in the market. And while the product has grown fast, we’ve barely scratched the surface of what’s possible when a platform is built entirely around the needs of shippers.
We’ll be telling more of that story in the weeks ahead. You’ll meet the team behind the scenes. Get a look at the product in action. And hear directly from the brands using Ship Angel to future-proof their freight operations.
Big things are coming. Stay tuned for Part 2.