The ‘Uber for trucking’ tries to navigate some uber-scale problems

Amit Sekhri took up trucking in the thick of the Great Recession, drawn in part by the freedom of driving the open roads. He was prepared for long hours and weeks away from home. But two of his biggest—and least expected—gripes were the constant phone calls and late payments. Like many truckers, Sekhri booked his jobs through freight brokers, a class of intermediaries who do most of their business by phone. And many have a bad habit of paying late.

Then he discovered an app called Convoy. It lets him select nearby loads listed by shippers and get paid a day or two after completing a trip. It uses a phone’s GPS to estimate a driver’s arrival time for pickup and tracks where he is throughout the route. For these reasons, Convoy Inc.