Business: Freightlancer, Dubbo


Freightlancer has revolutionised the freight, transport and shipping industry, taking it to a global marketplace.

The company is a subsidiary of Freelancer, the world’s largest freelancing and crowdsourcing marketplace with a network of more than 31 million. Freightlancer connects freight owners with transport operators, simplifying the supply chain by providing a turn-key management system. 

Freightlancer was launched in late 2018 as an enterprise marketplace company following the acquisition of Channel 40, which was founded in 2016 by EMS Group CEO Tom Cavanagh. Founded in Dubbo, it is one of Australia’s largest underground mining and tunnelling service providers.

Freightlancer facilitates the fast, reliable and cost-efficient transport of freight while ensuring a high standard of compliance. It serves the mining, construction, tunnelling, rail and oil and gas industries with more than 8000 vetted professional transport companies. In its early days, Freightlancer was created as a platform for smaller operators or owner drivers to pick up back loads - or a full trailer for every leg of the trip - and for freight owners to have an easier way to find trucks and move mining equipment. From there, the company has evolved to add medium to large transport companies and brokers, more mine sites, more manufacturers and quarries, moving cargo across town and across the country. 

The breadth of items moved ranges from small parcels and pallet-size boxes to medium and large enterprise equipment such as 150 tonne dump trucks.

Freightlancer provides a marketplace to match freight owners and shippers to transport companies, brokers and shipping lines. As part of its service, Freightlancer also provides a management system to provide more insight into the logistics industry and offers transparency while also increasing productivity for logistics and freight coordinators.

With offices in Dubbo, Brisbane, Perth, Sydney, Vancouver and San Francisco, Freightlancer has experienced rapid growth from its early beginnings. The business now has employees all over the country and is in the midst of expanding around the world.

In its head office, Freightlancer has a Chief Executive Officer, Chief Financial Officer, two sales people, a freight operations specialist, technical account manager and general manager. 

Today, Freightlancer is truly international and is working towards providing not just a marketplace but a complete business tool that will simplify the logistics of moving freight both domestically and internationally.

Since the acquisition, there has been a big effort to expand the platform into international markets and the team is adding features to improve the automation of international logistics.

Freightlancer’s services are largely delivered via the company’s online platform. As such, the primary channel of distribution is the internet, giving freight owners and operators, shipping businesses, transportation providers, drivers and logistics brokers access to services from anywhere in the world.

The company also provides new efficiencies to anyone involved in freight, shipping and logistics locally and further afield, whether it is freight owners, truck drivers, rail operators or logistics brokers. Given the sheer volume and value of freight in Australia and around the world, the efficiencies offered by the Freightlancer platform have the potential to help businesses make their dollar go further.

Freightlancer has received recognition due to its unique business model and is well-known in Australia’s mining and resources industry and general freight and logistics industry domestically and further afield.

Sound industry knowledge in this regard is one of the company’s biggest strengths. Increasing international expansion is its main challenge. However, with the global network offered by the Freelancer marketplace and the newfound resources available as a subsidiary of this company, will create a firm grounding for future expansion.

Freightlancer expects to expand more throughout 2019 and beyond, with the company poised to tap into the Freelancer marketplace and its underlying technology. This global network offers Freightlancer the ability to dramatically broaden its reach right around the world. At present, the Freightlancer team is setting its sights on the North American market in particular, and parts of Asia. It is hoped that Freightlancer will one day be a globally recognised name and an undisputed leader in the international freight logistics and shipping industry.