As freight companies expand, so does the number of systems and trading partners they need to connect. Those connections typically rely on APIs and EDI, but maintaining hundreds of integrations can eventually become a major engineering burden, slowing software development and forcing companies to add more technical staff simply to keep existing connections running.
Tavio believes a growing number of carriers, brokers and shippers have reached that point. The company is also pushing further into the 3PL and logistics software markets. Uber Freight is already among its customers, according to Tavio Chief Financial Officer Paul Mladineo.
The company operates in the Integration Platform as a Service, or iPaaS, market. Its platform brings traditional B2B EDI messaging and modern REST and JSON APIs together on the same architecture. On-premises databases and AI agents can also use those same data pathways.
The underlying proposition is straightforward: companies should not have to build and maintain a separate point-to-point integration for every vendor and every trading partner.
Tavio significantly expanded its freight capabilities last fall by adding a public API, an on-premises agent and native EDI functionality. Those additions broadened the platform beyond cloud-only environments and into the legacy B2B data-exchange systems that remain deeply embedded across trucking and shipping.
The maintenance burden is where the problem becomes particularly expensive.
According to MuleSoft’s 2026 Connectivity Benchmark Report, published in February by the Salesforce-owned integration company, IT leaders spend 36% of their time designing, building and testing custom integrations between systems and data. The same survey found that the average organization operates 957 applications, but only 27% are connected to anything else.
“Our solution is not ‘we will take care of all of your integration services for you,’” said Damian Newland, Tavio’s vice president of strategy and growth, in an interview with FreightWaves. “Our offer is a technology platform that an organization can use to drastically reduce the headcount, time, and effort to deliver the integrations that they need internally and with their customers.”
Where integration complexity starts to multiply
Tavio’s challenge is one that becomes particularly visible in freight: two customers using the same carrier do not necessarily structure their data in the same way.
That means a connection to one transportation or warehouse system can quickly turn into a collection of slightly different integrations.
“The issue is that an integration that is required with a WMS like Manhattan may require 300 different flavors to accommodate 300 different trading partners,” Newland said. “It comes down to subtle variations – one customer calls a field ‘shipment ID’ while another calls it ‘tracking number.’”
Mladineo illustrated the issue with a growing freight brokerage.
A broker may initially create one integration with a trucking company and run five customers through it. But if the third customer requires different rules, the original integration has to be forked. When the fifth customer needs another set of custom logic, a third version is created.
“And now multiply that. Now they’re bigger, right?” Mladineo said. “So now they’re working with 50 trucking companies and on the other side retailers, and they’ve got to manage all this. And it’s not 50 integrations because we just said one integration for five customers turned into three.”
The difference between the number of trading partners and the actual number of integrations is ultimately created by custom code.
Tavio’s answer is to establish a fixed data path and place configurable rules on top of it. The company refers to this model as “Data as Configuration,” allowing customers to build once and deploy across multiple use cases.
The underlying connection to a particular vendor remains unchanged. Customer-specific schemas, mappings and data rules can then be adjusted without rewriting the integration itself.
“So it’s configurable without having to write new code,” Mladineo said. “So you don’t have to maintain anything.”
Faster onboarding can accelerate revenue
Newland sees the financial impact in terms of cash conversion.
A shipment triggers a sequence of digital messages. An order acknowledgment and packing slip move out, while a delivery notification and invoice come back. For those transactions to work smoothly, messages have to travel correctly between the systems of two separate companies.
Until that connectivity is in place, billing can also be delayed.
“I sell something, but I only get paid when it gets to the customer,” Newland said. “So the faster I can onboard that customer and set up all the integrations, the faster we get paid, and the more accurately it can be carried out, the less cost of error there is.”
The opposite is equally true when an integration breaks.
A failed EDI mapping or an expired API credential can stop data from flowing between systems, while the company affected by the problem may not know there is an issue until a customer reports it.
“What a company needs is to find out that it went wrong as soon as possible and then have a pathway to fix it as quickly as possible,” Newland said. “And if it’s a custom-coded integration built to one of the five API endpoints that that vendor provided me and it’s different for every customer that I have, it can quickly become a mess.”
Developer time remains the hidden cost
For Tavio, engineering capacity is one of the clearest measures of the cost of custom integration.
Every bespoke connection needs a developer to create it and someone else, or often the same team, to maintain it whenever a trading partner changes an API or modifies its data schema.
Finding people with the right skills is another problem. Developers who understand long-established EDI environments are increasingly difficult to recruit.
“This is a talent-scarce talent pool. They’re not people I can get off the street,” Newland said. “They’re not cheap and they’re not hanging around. They’re hard to get, and particularly with the aging infrastructure some of the EDI developers are almost impossible to find.”
Software vendors face the same pressure from another direction.
TMS, WMS and yard management providers may want to offer integration capabilities directly inside their products. Otherwise, their own engineering teams can end up spending valuable development cycles onboarding customers rather than improving the software itself.
Tavio has already seen that model outside the freight sector.
According to a November announcement, HR software provider BambooHR uses Tavio’s public API to allow its customers to deploy integrations without leaving the BambooHR interface.
“Those companies want their developers to be building their product,” Newland said. “They want them to be rolling out new functionality and making their product better, not building and maintaining, to your point, integrations.”
AI agents make governance more important
The emergence of autonomous AI agents adds another layer of complexity to the integration challenge.
An AI agent given access to a company’s systems can retrieve whatever it is authorized to access. In freight, however, not every piece of information should be available to every party. Pricing data, for example, may be information a shipper should not see or a carrier should not disclose.
MuleSoft’s benchmark report highlights the broader issue. Data integration was identified by 82% of IT leaders surveyed as one of the biggest challenges associated with AI adoption. Half of the AI agents in the survey also operate in isolation rather than being connected to other agents.
“Agents are wonderful because you can let them loose, right?” Mladineo said. “And they can extract data if you give them permission effectively, if there’s an MCP server or some other way for them to get data, they will without restraint. And so you certainly don’t want the wrong data being exposed to the wrong user.”
Mladineo argues that a centralized integration platform can provide the governance layer needed to control that access.
Instead of having security and access rules scattered across numerous point-to-point integrations, those rules can be enforced directly at the integration layer for every consumer of the data, including AI agents.
“It’s those rules that say you can’t look at the pricing,” he said. “You have to look at timestamps. You can extract that data but the pricing data you can’t extract.”
Legacy systems make the issue more complicated.
Many freight and logistics companies still depend on IBM AS400 mainframes to run core operations. Giving an AI agent direct access to those systems would represent a significant expansion of data access, potentially reaching infrastructure that was built long before modern AI governance policies existed.
Tavio positions itself within a competitive iPaaS market
Tavio is not entering an empty market.
Mladineo pointed to Cleo as a major iPaaS provider already established in freight transportation, along with several other competitors.
“But we like the way that we’re approaching it from both an efficiency, complexity, scale perspective in a way that’s well aligned with value,” Mladineo said. “We think that we occupy a pretty unique starting point in the logistics case.”
The practical value of the platform varies depending on the type of company using it.
For a mid-market freight brokerage generating $500 million in revenue, for example, the challenge may be maintaining point-to-point integrations that were originally developed years earlier by a smaller engineering team.
“With Tavio, you’re still changing it once and that could be across a thousand customers with that one trucking company, and sometimes it could be across multiple other vendors depending on where that change needs to occur,” Mladineo said.
For software companies, the issue becomes one of resource allocation: should engineers spend their time maintaining customer integrations, or building the next generation of the product?
Newland describes Tavio’s intended position across both markets with a simple phrase.
“The intelligent infrastructure for supply chain data connectivity is the way we describe ourselves,” he said. “It’s a headline that we think sums up our proposition.”
The broader issue Tavio is targeting is less about creating integrations than keeping them operational at scale. A single WMS connection can turn into hundreds of customer-specific versions, while revenue can remain tied up until the underlying messages successfully move between systems. At the same time, the pool of engineers capable of maintaining legacy EDI environments is becoming increasingly difficult to access.
Tavio’s pitch is to centralize that complexity on one platform, allowing logistics and software companies to spend fewer engineering hours maintaining integrations and more time developing their core products.
