Palace Wants to Replace the Spreadsheets Running America's Trucking Fleets

The Macro: Trucking Runs on Gut Feel and It Shows

I keep returning to the same observation about logistics technology: the size of the market is inversely proportional to the quality of the software. Trucking is a $900 billion industry in the United States alone. It moves 72% of the nation’s freight by weight. And the majority of dispatch and load planning decisions at small and mid-size carriers are made by humans staring at whiteboards, Excel spreadsheets, and TMS platforms that look like they were designed in 2003.

The load planning problem is deceptively hard. A dispatcher has to consider driver availability, Hours of Service regulations, truck locations, fuel costs, load weights, delivery windows, deadhead miles, and rate fluctuations. All of this changes constantly. A driver calls in sick. A shipper moves a pickup window. Fuel prices spike in a specific corridor. The dispatcher recalculates everything in their head and makes a decision. That decision determines whether the carrier makes money on the load or loses it.

The existing TMS market is dominated by incumbents that have been around for decades. TMW (now Trimble), McLeod Software, and Samsara handle different pieces of the puzzle. Samsara does fleet visibility and ELD compliance. McLeod handles dispatch and accounting. Trimble covers everything from routing to fuel optimization. But none of them do intelligent load planning. They give dispatchers data. They do not tell dispatchers what to do with it.

The opportunity is in the decision layer. The data already exists. ELD devices track every truck in real time. Load boards like DAT and Truckstop (now Trucker Path) publish available freight with rates and routes. TMS platforms store historical performance data. The problem is that all of this data sits in separate systems and nobody is synthesizing it into an optimized plan. Dispatchers do it manually because no tool does it for them.

Freight rates have been volatile since the pandemic. The Cass Freight Index shows wild swings between capacity crunches and oversupply. In that environment, the difference between a well-planned fleet and a poorly-planned one is the difference between profitability and bankruptcy. Small carriers operate on margins of 3 to 8 percent. A few bad load decisions per week can wipe out an entire quarter.

The Micro: An Alchemy PM and an Amazon Tech Lead Walk Into a Truck Stop

Palace builds AI-powered dispatch and planning software that unifies driver, operations, and freight data to optimize load plans. The core pitch is maximizing asset utilization and revenue per truck without adding headcount.

Leeds Rising and Derek Ye are the founders. They have worked together for over six years. Leeds was the 7th product manager at Alchemy and the first PM at Golden, which was later acquired. He studied Computer Science and Operations Research at Cornell. That operations research background is directly relevant to load optimization, which is fundamentally a constraint satisfaction problem. Derek was a tech lead at Amazon and a founding engineer at Arpeggi Labs, which was backed by a16z. They are based in San Francisco and went through Y Combinator’s Summer 2025 batch.

The product works in three layers. Load selection lets dispatchers evaluate and assign spot or contract loads from a unified interface rather than juggling multiple load boards and TMS screens. Automatic planning uses AI to build optimal fleet plans around the carrier’s specific KPIs and constraints. Real-time adjustment handles dynamic replanning when conditions on the ground change, which they always do.

The onboarding process takes seven to ten weeks across four phases: value analysis of existing loads and ELD data, tool synchronization with the carrier’s TMS and ELD systems (importantly, Palace integrates rather than replaces), custom platform tuning with the operations team, and ongoing support including on-site visits. That hands-on approach signals that Palace understands trucking operators are not going to adopt a self-serve SaaS tool overnight. This is a relationship sale.

The competitive positioning is interesting. Samsara is the dominant fleet visibility platform but does not optimize load plans. Convoy tried to build an automated freight brokerage and shut down in 2023 after burning through $900 million. Uber Freight is the largest digital brokerage but serves shippers, not carriers. Loadsmart does AI-powered pricing and matching but is also broker-focused. The carrier-side planning tool market is remarkably underserved given the size of the industry.

The company is currently two people. That is small even by YC standards. But the product is live, they have a functioning website with a demo booking flow, and the company is operated under Lucid Spring Inc. with a trust center already in place. For a two-person team, the operational maturity is notable.

The Verdict

Palace is going after a real problem in a massive market with terrible existing solutions. The dispatchers I have talked to universally agree that load planning software has not kept up with the complexity of modern freight operations. If Palace can deliver an AI that actually makes better load decisions than a veteran dispatcher with twenty years of experience, carriers will pay for it without hesitation.

The challenge is trust. Trucking is a conservative industry run by people who have strong opinions about how to move freight. Telling a dispatcher that an algorithm knows better than they do is a hard sell regardless of whether it is true. The seven-to-ten-week onboarding process suggests Palace understands this and is planning to earn trust gradually rather than demanding it upfront.

In thirty days, I want to know how many carriers are using the product and what their fleet sizes look like. Sixty days, the metric is revenue per truck. Can Palace show a measurable improvement compared to the carrier’s previous planning process? Ninety days, the question is whether this is a tool that dispatchers actually use daily or one that sits unused after the onboarding team leaves. The market needs this product. The founders have the right technical backgrounds. The risk is that two people cannot move fast enough in an industry that requires boots on the ground at truck terminals across the country.