Importers & Exporters Top 100 2026 Spotlight thing,” he said. But LunaPath stood out, McCandless said, especially in high- volume voice and messaging execution use cases, prompting the decision to buy the emergent company.
Presenting the Breakbulk Shipper Index
The Journal of Commerce has launched an exclusive benchmark for the breakbulk and project cargo sector designed to improve transparency in ship capacity projections and contract negotiations. Unveiled at the Journal of Commerce’ s Breakbulk and Project Cargo Conference 2026, the Breakbulk Shipper Index tracks a range of indicators including changes in volumes carried by different vessel types, lead time for chartering vessels and load and discharge regions. The index is based on cargo owner activity rather than data from cargo carriers. Input comes from a range of cargo owner types, including engineering, procurement and construction companies( EPCs), manufacturers of breakbulk and project cargo, project owners, and project freight forwarders. Susan Oatway, the Journal of Commerce’ s senior research analyst for breakbulk and project cargo, has been building the index since July 2024 after requests from EPCs and original equipment manufacturers for an index that they could use
Shutterstock. com project44 acquires agentic AI developer
Logistics technology provider project44 has acquired an automation company focused on building digital agents that cover dozens of prebuilt use cases across international and domestic freight. The all-cash acquisition, terms of which were not disclosed, will enable project44 to embed agents from Chicago-based LunaPath into its visibility and transportation management products. Founded in 2024, LunaPath develops logistics orchestration- and execution-focused agents that tackle discrete tasks such as sourcing missing ocean freight milestones and retrieving container location at the port of discharge. The company’ s digital workers undertake tasks in domestic freight as well, such as finding missing equipment identifiers and resolving invalid truck telematics connections. LunaPath’ s sale is the first of the dozen or so artificial intelligence-focused agent developers serving the logistics and transportation industry to have emerged in the last three years. project44 CEO Jett McCandless told the Journal of Commerce the company had been trialing a number of these providers side by side over the past 16 months to see which ones performed best using project44’ s data.“ The reality is there isn’ t one that’ s the best at everyto track future freight contract pricing. The Journal of Commerce Breakbulk Shipper Index covers five vessel types: a general cargo ship with single-lift capacity of under 250 tons, project cargo carriers with single-lift capacity of over 250 tons, container carriers, deck cargo carriers, and roll-on / roll-off vessels. The published index is a consolidated figure, weighted against the five ship types. The index is now active and available for use by the industry.
Quarterly Intelligence Report
Forward-looking analysis built on our journalists’ reporting on ocean, air, rail, trucking and ports.
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