Flexport anticipates it will be in profitable in 2025 thanks to the freight tech company’s sale of the Convoy freight-matching platform.
The digital freight forwarder targeted profitability by the end of this year, with CEO Ryan Petersen telling the Wall Street Journal that the Convoy sale was a “one-time event” that “was more than our burn rate for this year.”
Flexport sold the once-defunct freight booking platform to DAT Freight & Analytics for $250 million, flipping it nearly two years after acquiring the technology stack out of insolvency for roughly $16 million.
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Without the Convoy sale, Flexport would not be able to reach its 2025 profitability goal, Petersen said. The founder said the company is now on track for a profitable 2026 driven by organic growth as it expands into new countries, cuts costs and seeks to take more market share from larger competitors in the freight forwarding industry like DHL, C.H. Robinson, Kuehne+Nagel and DSV.
According to the WSJ article, Flexport opened an office in Indonesia earlier this month and plans to launch in six additional countries in 2026.
The company’s growth is contingent on an industry that has been hit heavily by decreased demand and slower shipping volume growth in recent years, ultimately resulting in lower freight rates. Package delivery titans like UPS and FedEx have been hit hard by the demand shifts, with both implementing mass cost-cutting efforts to save billions of dollars and improve efficiency.
Flexport is one of many logistics businesses that has had to maneuver the on-and-off tariff whiplash of 2025.
Customers had to suspend or stop freight bookings altogether when the U.S. tacked “reciprocal” duties on imports from trade partners worldwide in April, before rushing orders into the country again after the tariffs were given a three-month delay. The back-and-forth resulted in a brief (and early) peak shipping season that saw year-over-year cargo growth at U.S. ports in July, before inbound volumes began their downturn starting in August.
Air freight at Flexport took a hit as well, not just from the tariffs, but from the closure of the duty-free de minimis provision. The Trump administration banned the trade exemption for low-value shipments out of China at the start May, before putting a stop to the provision for any foreign goods headed to the U.S. in late August. As volumes on the Asia-to-U.S. trade lane suffered, Flexport moved less air cargo for its clients.
“Air freight prices are quite low because of the end of de minimis shipping,” Petersen told CNBC in a Friday interview. “That was a huge percentage of the world’s air freight that’s more or less gone away.”
According to Petersen, Flexport’s warehousing and customs brokerage businesses have benefitted from the U.S. trade policy shifts. Flexport’s gross profit on its customs brokerage and compliance business is up 99 percent year over year in 2025.
From a financial perspective, Flexport had still been losing money prior to the Convoy deal.
Shopify’s earnings results in August indicate that the e-commerce company incurred a net loss of $24 million on its Flexport investment in the second quarter. Those results are reported on a one-quarter delay, meaning the loss came in Flexport’s April-to-June quarter.
Combined with the quarter prior, Shopify lost $47 million over the latest six months reported by Flexport.
In total, Shopify’s investment in Flexport is $595 million as of June 30, down from $642 million six months prior. Given that the tech titan has a 17 percent stake in Flexport as of Sept. 30, 2023, Flexport’s estimated valuation stands at $3.5 billion, still a far cry from its peak of $8 billion in February 2022 when the company hauled in a $935 million Series E funding round.
As the company hopes to improve its fortunes in 2026, is expanding its supply chain financing business by partnering with asset management firm BlackRock. With the team up, Flexport is expanding financing options for companies facing higher tariff costs and other trade-related strains on cash flow.
BlackRock-managed funds and accounts will provide $250 million to Flexport within the partnership, nearly doubling Flexport’s current lending capacity, the companies say.
The freight tech firm’s financial services arm, Flexport Capital, has provided more than $2 billion since it started in 2017.
The BlackRock partnership will last four years, and allows financing across various points of companies’ supply chains through purchase orders, inventory pickup, freight movement, warehousing and final delivery.
