We built the inbox triage we wished existed.
Keelway is an AI carrier-email triage and broker TMS company, built in Atlanta. We started Keelway because every freight broker we talked to had the same hidden tax baked into their day — forty carrier replies per posted load, an hour of reading and comparing and FMCSA-checking and copying rates into spreadsheets, before any actual decision got made. The work was real. The tool for it wasn't.
What we believe
Three convictions shape every product decision at Keelway.
The inbox is the brokerage
Every broker tool built since 2010 has assumed brokers would live inside its UI. Brokers don't. They live in Gmail and Outlook. The TMS exists; it's a system of record nobody opens first. The inbox is where the day actually happens — where quotes arrive, decisions get made, problems get worked. Keelway starts from that reality. Our AI sits where brokers already are.
Honest math beats marketing math
Freight is a low-margin business. Brokers can tell when a vendor is doing wishful arithmetic in a pitch deck. We publish prices. We compare honestly — even when the competitor is cheaper. We tell brokers when they don't need our product. The handful of compare pages on this site where we'd come off second on headline price all say so explicitly; that's deliberate. Earning a customer once requires being a credible source the other 95% of the time.
Free tools, no email gate
Every tool on our tools page works without a signup. FMCSA lookup, the bond calculator, the carrier-email red-flag scanner — all of them. The product version of each runs inside Keelway automatically on every email. The free version is the same thing, run once, gated on nothing. We'd rather have a broker use the tool and remember the brand than collect an email address that wasn't given freely.
What we do
Keelway has two products that share an engine.
- Keelway AI (bundled in every TMS plan; standalone as FreightMail, per inbox): The carrier-email triage layer. Reads every inbound carrier reply on a posted load — via your Keelway reply address, or a connected Gmail / Microsoft 365 / IMAP mailbox if you want it in your inbox — extracts the rate, scores the carrier against FMCSA + insurance + fraud signals, and ranks the top five inside the broker's existing inbox. Thirty-day free trial, no card to start.
- Keelway TMS (from $175/mo by truck count): The full broker transportation management system with the AI built in — load entry, dispatch, carrier records, rate confirmations, accounting integration, all wrapped around the AI inbox. Unlimited users. $0 setup.
On the carrier side, we're also building Keelway Platform — a carrier-operations command center with 23 modules covering everything a trucking company runs on (loads, GPS, invoicing, settlements, fuel, tolls, IFTA, DOT compliance). It shares the same AI inbox engine the broker side uses.
Where we are today
We're intentionally pre-revenue at scale. Keelway is being built with a small group of early-customer brokerages in 2026 — the kind that'll tell us when something's wrong before the next person notices. If you're a freight brokerage interested in being one of the early ones, the contact page is the door.
What that means in plain language: we publish what we've built, we don't publish what we haven't. The compare pages comparing us to McLeod and Aljex are honest about where we're a step-up and where we're a step-into. The security and compliance posture (/security) is honest about which attestations are in build-out versus complete. The case studies (/case-studies) are clearly labeled as composite reference profiles, not fake testimonials. We won't put a logo wall up until the logos are real and the customers approve.
Who's building this
Keelway is built by two people in Atlanta, Georgia: Shafay Ahmed, who writes the software, and Ahmad, who runs freight at Triple C Trucking and keeps the product honest about how a brokerage day actually works. The decision to keep the team small in the early phase is deliberate: every customer call, every line of code, every email a broker sends to hello@keelway.com goes to the people who'll fix the issue. That stops scaling the moment we add the right next hire. Until then, direct work, direct accountability.
The team will grow with the customer base, not ahead of it. That's another deliberate call.
Where we are
Atlanta, Georgia. Email hello@keelway.com reaches us directly. The contact page routes to a form that lands in the same inbox.