chrt Is Building the Control Tower for Shipments That Cannot Be Late

The Macro: The $30 Billion Problem With Getting Things There Right Now

There is a version of logistics that most people never think about. Not the Amazon box that shows up in two days. Not the container ship crossing the Pacific. The other kind. The shipment that has to arrive today, in the next few hours, or someone’s surgery gets canceled, a production line goes idle, or a plane does not fly.

Time-critical logistics is a $30 billion market growing at around 20% per year, and it runs on infrastructure that would embarrass a pizza delivery chain. I am not exaggerating. Talk to anyone who coordinates urgent medical shipments or emergency industrial parts deliveries, and they will describe a workflow involving phone calls, text messages, email chains with seven people CC’d, and maybe a shared spreadsheet if the operation is feeling modern.

The reason this corner of logistics has stayed so manual is that the stakes are too high for bad software. When a courier is moving a transplant organ or a critical aerospace component, the dispatcher cannot afford for the tracking to lag, the routing to fail, or the proof-of-delivery to be ambiguous. So they default to direct human communication, which is reliable but does not scale.

The TMS (Transportation Management System) market is enormous and well-served at the top end. Oracle, SAP, and BluJay run the big enterprise logistics operations. Flexport rebuilt freight forwarding for the venture-backed era. Project44 does supply chain visibility. But almost all of these products were designed for standard freight, where “on time” means within a delivery window of hours or days. The urgency profile of time-critical shipping is different enough that general-purpose TMS platforms handle it poorly.

Smaller competitors exist in the courier dispatch space. Onfleet, Bringg, and Tookan all do last-mile delivery management. But they are built for the food delivery and e-commerce fulfillment use case, where a late order means someone eats cold pizza. The healthcare and manufacturing verticals need different compliance, different proof-of-delivery requirements, and different alerting.

That gap, between enterprise TMS platforms that are too slow and last-mile tools that are too casual, is exactly where chrt is positioning itself.

The Micro: McKinsey Engineers Who Actually Left to Build Something

chrt is a five-person team out of YC’s Spring 2025 batch, founded by Kyle Reagan and Aaron Carver. Both are former software engineers who met at McKinsey, which is a sentence that could go either way. In this case, it goes the good way: Kyle previously led strategy at a Series C time-critical logistics startup, so he has seen the problem from inside a company that tried to solve it. Aaron’s background is in AI/ML systems and generative AI deployment.

The product is a TMS built specifically for time-critical shipping. It spans three customer types: shippers (the companies that need things moved urgently), couriers (the people moving them), and freight forwarders (the brokers coordinating air and ground transport).

The feature set is dense. Real-time tracking across drivers, couriers, and freight forwarders. Customizable proof-of-delivery with photos, signatures, barcode/QR scanning, and GPS verification. Live driver mapping. Multi-stop route optimization. An offline-capable driver app that syncs when connectivity returns, which matters more than you might think when couriers are running into hospital basements and warehouse loading docks.

The alerting system supports email, SMS, push notifications, and webhooks. That last one matters for enterprise buyers who want to pipe delivery events into their own systems. Billing integrates with Stripe. Accounting integrates with QuickBooks. IATA/IAC integration handles flight bookings for air freight.

Pricing is transparent and tiered. Small courier operations (up to five drivers) pay $100 per month plus $0.50 per stop. Medium operations are $300 per month plus $50 per member. Enterprise starts at $1,000 per month. Freight forwarding is $5,000 per month plus per-order fees. That is aggressive pricing for what looks like a full-featured TMS.

The IoT tracker play is interesting. Starting at $15 to $20 per device, airline-approved, with a “bring your own device” option. For healthcare shipments where chain-of-custody documentation is non-negotiable, having hardware-level tracking integrated into the same platform as the dispatch software is a legitimate advantage over stringing together three different vendors.

The Verdict

I think the market opportunity here is real and underserved. Time-critical logistics has distinct requirements that general-purpose platforms handle as edge cases rather than core features. Building specifically for urgency, compliance, and multi-modal transport is a defensible strategy.

What I would want to know at 30 days: who are the first paying customers, and are they couriers, shippers, or forwarders? The platform serves three different user types, and the go-to-market motion will be very different depending on which one pulls hardest.

At 60 days: how does the driver app hold up in real conditions? Offline capability and GPS verification sound great in a feature list. In a hospital parking garage with no signal, with a courier who has been driving for ten hours, the UX tolerance is zero. Either it works instantly or it does not get used.

At 90 days: can they close freight forwarding contracts at $5,000 per month? That is where the real revenue lives, but freight forwarders are relationship-driven buyers who do not switch platforms on a demo. The sales cycle will test the team’s patience and capital.

The McKinsey pedigree combined with actual domain experience in time-critical logistics gives me more confidence than the usual “we noticed a problem” founding story. They did not notice the problem. They worked inside it.