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Logistics giant Ryder establishes technology lab led by founders of Silicon Valley startup Baton

Nancy Dahlberg
Nancy Dahlberg
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By Nancy Dahlberg

On a mission to transform transportation and supply chain networks and prepare for the coming AI wave, Ryder System, the Miami-based logistics and transportation giant, announced the formation of an innovation laboratory.

The technology lab, based in Silicon Valley, will be led by the founders of Baton, a startup that Ryder first invested in and then acquired last year. The lab will build on Ryder’s $1.3 billion in strategic investments over the past five years to develop, acquire and invest in innovative technologies, products and services, including making trucking more efficient by reducing emissions and the number of empty trucks on the road.

“When the timing was right, it all came together and we knew that we wanted to own the development of these applications versus partnering with other companies or buying off the shelf. Our goal is really around setting up teams to be successful, to start building a lot more of those digital technologies,” said Karen Jones, CMO and head of new product development for Ryder, in an interview with Refresh Miami.

To do that meant providing a new team of world-class engineers with a startup environment where they have the freedom to create solutions for some of the most pressing challenges of the $2.5 trillion North American logistics and transportation industries – along with the resources of Ryder, a leader in supply chain, dedicated transportation and fleet management solutions and a $12 billion publicly traded company.

“We’re looking for the best and the brightest.” Jones said. “That’s really the goal.”

Karen Jones, Ryder CMO and head of new product development

Leading Ryder’s innovation lab are Andrew Berberick and Nate Robert [pictured above], co-chief product and technology officers for Ryder.  In 2019, they founded San Francisco-based startup Baton, known for the development of a proprietary logistics technology to figure out the optimal way to assign loads to trucks to minimize their downtime and maximize their efficiency, Robert told Refresh Miami. “There is a massive amount of waste when supply chains do not communicate. We believe we can change that.”

To be called Baton, the Ryder technology lab’s first project continues on that mission, creating an AI-powered digital platform and optimization engine to manage transportation networks for customers where seasonality and fluctuating demand inhibit the continuous use of resources, Robert said. “The larger goal of our group now is to continue to build digital products within Ryder and also what are the other opportunities?” Those opportunities, of course, include harnessing the power of generative AI for innovation in the logistics industry. The first wave of generative AI is broad, powerful and great at reading the internet but it doesn’t know anything about logistics –  including Ryder’s millions of frieght movements and transactions and all the data that surrounds that, Robert said.

Robert holds a bachelor’s degree from MIT and master’s degree from Stanford University and worked for BuildZoom and Bain & Company before cofounding Baton. Berberick holds a bachelor’s and master’s degree from Stanford and worked for Google, Accenture, and Mindtribe.

The team so far numbers about 30, and they bring experience from Apple, Meta, OpenAI, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Tesla and other companies. While the initial team was hired in San Francisco, it also includes about 10 from Miami’s internal tech team. The aim is reach about 50 in the lab’s first year.

Robert and Jones said as the team grows, there will likely be more opportunities for hiring from Miami.

 “Miami is a strong place for recruiting talent. It’s the next place for us to start exploring. I think there’s some great resource sitting right there in Miami that certainly could be a part of this team,” Robert said.

The new technology lab is part of a major initiative Ryder started about six years ago that has involved developing in-house startups, including COOP, a truck-sharing platform, investing in others including Miami’s SmartHop through a $50 million RyderVentures fund launched two years ago, and the Baton acquisition that has now led to establishing this technology lab.

“We have a small, scrappy team of 30 people. We’re working hard, we’re building fast, iterating quickly. It is like the guts of a startup culture but we also now have access to the resources and the reach of a massive company, one of the largest transportation companies,” Robert said.

“We now have access to billions of dollars and millions of freight movements and the impact that we can have now is so much greater than a normal startup of 30 people can have.”

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Nancy Dahlberg
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