The FreightCaviar Podcast: From Harvard to AI: Dhruv Gupta on Revolutionizing Brokerages with Drumkit

In this week’s episode, we sat down with Dhruv Gupta, Co-Founder and CEO of Drumkit, (formerly known as Axle Technologies), an integration tool that automates tasks. Dhruv reflects on his experiences at Harvard, provides insightful perspectives on what differentiates brokerages, and discusses their future.

From Harvard to Entrepreneurship

Dhruv’s story begins at Harvard, where he graduated with a Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science and Government in 2020. As a child, he was fascinated with everything related to transportation, logistics, and shipping, which eventually led him to open his first startup right after college. “Not a great time to be doing bike, scooter, and last mile sharing optimization,” he reflects. Dhruv left the company not long after. However, as the saying goes, energy and persistence conquer all. About a year later, he teamed up with his co-founder and research advisor, Dr. Jinyan Zang, to start Drumkit.

The Birth of Drumkit

He shared the ethos behind the company: “We want you to make decisions and build relationships without having to take actions. So we sit in your inbox as an AI email assistant. But at the end of the day, we're actually just an integration tool that automates certain tasks for you- things like data entry, load building, and quoting into your TMS. Reading those responses from carriers, realizing, ‘Oh, there's something going wrong,’ and then escalating that up to you so that you can make a decision on that behavior.”

What Sets Brokerages Apart

Dhruv also provided insights into what he believes sets brokerages apart. In his opinion, the difference between a billion-dollar brokerage and a million-dollar one lies in scale. “Obviously, everybody has different processes, but the core fundamentals aren’t very different across brokerages. And so for us, we want to provide you an opinionated way of doing that that's flexible enough to plug into all your different tools."

AI’s Role in Modern Technology

Dhruv discussed the evolution of AI throughout the years and how Drumkit leverages it to make technology more accessible and tailored to individual needs. “It integrates with all of your tools out of the box. You don't need an engineering team to manage that. You don't need an engineering team to customize and figure out your own TMS and all of those things. We already have that.”

Shaping the Future of Brokerages

He also shared his thoughts on the future of brokerages and how companies, such as Drumkit, make building a brokerage easier. “I think we're going to see what's happening now- there's a short life cycle for some small brokerages, and there's a ceiling. It's hard to get to $10 million in revenue, and then when you do get there, it's easy to plateau. Below that, there's a lot of brokerages that live for a couple of years and get acquired quickly, or they die, and then they're reborn. I think it's going to get easier with new technologies like ours to have a brokerage in a box and just get up and go build your company.”