While the logistics industry has endured a tumultuous market over the last several decades, one company has achieved steady and — during some stretches — meteoric growth. Lucas Grizz founded Raven Cargo in 2020 with just three employees who worked out of a garage.
Fast-forward to 2024, and Lucas Grizz’s company has been making waves in the field. The business has proven to be resilient, versatile, and scalable, currently serving some of the biggest names in the logistics industry.
From Humble Beginnings to Exceptional Entrepreneur
You can’t tell the story of Raven Cargo without first understanding the life journey of its founder and CEO. Lucas Grizz moved to the United States at the age of ten. The Polish immigrant studied at DePaul University in Chicago before spending a decade at REMPREX LLC, ultimately managing a team of 80 employees.
During his time at REMPREX, the founder witnessed the benefits of automation firsthand, as his employer used a unique automated gate process that streamlined operations and promoted overall efficiency.
In 2018, he was struck with inspiration. He believed that he could fill a void in the industry by deploying automation at scale and simply “doing things better.” However, it took him “two years of due diligence and research to understand the industry.”
More importantly, Grizz realized he needed to align himself with experienced brokerage professionals to bring his vision to life. Ultimately, he convinced two individuals to join him on his entrepreneurial journey, one of whom serves as Raven Cargo’s CRO.
Innovation to Solve Decades-Old Industry Challenges
Raven Cargo wasn’t founded to be just another service provider. Instead, it provides a broad suite of services designed to solve issues that have “plagued the logistics industry for years.”
Grizz was particularly critical of unethical business practices and “double brokering.” The latter occurs when a broker subcontracts a shipment to another, turning what should be a straightforward chain of custody into a “quagmire of deception and waste.”
Grizz views double brokering and shipment consolidation as key threats to the profitability and sustainability of logistics. While these constructs were designed to provide reliable freight for small and mid-sized organizations, the system can be manipulated, harming carriers.
The Raven Cargo team is not one to shy away from a challenge and has faced these issues head-on. They even developed a proprietary optimization tool dubbed RavenEye. The tool connects disparate data to promote transparency, efficiency, and accuracy.
RavenEye has a robust, artificial intelligence-powered architecture. Grizz explained that the tool “automatically distributes contracts, bill of lading documents, and other information to the appropriate system.”
Rapid Growth: The Calling Card of Raven Cargo
Over the last four years, Raven Cargo has grown into an 80-employee organization that operates in five countries: Canada, Mexico, the United States, Panama, and Poland. Despite being a relative newcomer to the field, the company already collaborates with several private and government entities.
The logistics industry faces a lot of uncertainty in the coming years. However, one thing is clear — innovators like Grizz are ready and able to tackle these challenges.
Members of the editorial and news staff of Us Weekly were not involved in the creation of this content.
