Craig Fuller

Founder & CEO FreightWaves

Last Reviewed: September 18, 2026

Executive Summary

Craig Fuller is the founder and Chief Executive Officer of FreightWaves, a freight market data, analytics and media company he started in April 2016 and built in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Its premise was that trucking — an industry moving hundreds of billions of dollars of goods — had no equivalent of the price transparency that commodities, equities, or energy markets take for granted. Rates were negotiated privately, capacity was invisible, and participants operated on anecdote and lagging indicators. FreightWaves set out to supply the missing market data, and the comparison the industry reached for was Bloomberg. Fuller came to the problem as a third-generation trucking figure who had already built and sold a fleet payments company.

Career Highlights

• Founded FreightWaves in April 2016 and leads it as CEO, grown to 251-500 employees.
• Built SONAR, the company’s freight market data and analytics platform.
• Founded TransCard, a fleet payment processor, and sold it to U.S. Bank.
• Founded and managed Xpress Direct, which became the largest provider of on-demand trucking services in North America.
• Son of U.S. Xpress founder Max Fuller and grandson of Southwest Motor Freight founder Clyde Fuller, having started in help-desk and driver manager roles.
• Holds a BBA in International Business and Entrepreneurship from Baylor University’s Hankamer School of Business.

Professional Journey

Fuller grew up inside the trucking industry. His grandfather Clyde Fuller founded Southwest Motor Freight; his father Max Fuller founded U.S. Xpress, which became one of the largest truckload carriers in the United States. Rather than entering at the top, he worked through operational roles at U.S. Xpress — help-desk technician, driver manager — that gave him direct exposure to how freight actually moves and where the friction lies. He studied international business and entrepreneurship at Baylor University’s Hankamer School of Business.

He went on to found and run Xpress Direct, the U.S. Xpress division built around on-demand and expedited trucking, which grew into the largest provider of on-demand trucking services in North America. He then founded TransCard, a fleet payment processor addressing how carriers pay for fuel and manage driver spending across a distributed fleet, and sold the business to U.S. Bank.

FreightWaves followed in April 2016, and its thesis was informational rather than operational. In most large markets, participants can observe a price. In freight, they could not: a shipper negotiating with a broker, or a carrier deciding whether to accept a load, had no reliable view of what the market rate actually was in that lane on that day, or of whether capacity was tightening. That opacity favored whoever had the most proprietary data, which was typically the largest intermediaries, and it made the market’s pronounced cycles hard to anticipate even for people living inside them.

FreightWaves built market data infrastructure to close that gap, with SONAR as its analytics platform, combining near-real-time rate and capacity indicators with the editorial operation that made the data legible and gave the company its reach. The editorial and data businesses reinforced each other: the journalism established credibility and audience, the data made the proposition commercial. Fuller has run both from Chattanooga, where he lives with his wife and five children, and is a private pilot.

Education

Baylor University, Hankamer School of Business

BBA, International Business and Entrepreneurship