Devin Johnson

Chief Executive Officer ShipNetwork

Last Reviewed: September 19, 2026

Executive Summary

Devin Johnson is the chief executive and owner of ShipNetwork, a US third-party logistics provider running high-volume e-commerce and enterprise fulfilment from a national network of warehouses. He arrived there by an unusual route. In 2014 he founded FirstMile, a Salt Lake City parcel carrier built around Xparcel, a patented routing algorithm that chose a carrier and service level for every individual package across USPS, UPS, FedEx, DHL and regional networks rather than committing a shipper to one contract. Rakuten bought FirstMile in 2019. Three years later Johnson bought it back — and, in the same month, bought Rakuten’s own fulfilment arm, Rakuten Super Logistics, renaming it ShipNetwork. FirstMile itself did not survive: merged into the FAST Group in August 2025, it stopped trading when that group wound down in January 2026.

Career Highlights

• Chief executive officer and owner of ShipNetwork, a US-based 3PL founded in 2001, with more than 250 staff across the country.
• Founded FirstMile in Salt Lake City in 2014 and built it into a national e-commerce parcel carrier serving over 1,500 clients.
• Created Xparcel, FirstMile’s patented multi-carrier ship method, which dynamically selected the optimal carrier per package in the manner of UPS SurePost or FedEx SmartPost but across networks.
• Sold FirstMile to Rakuten in 2019, alongside the fulfilment firm IFS360.
• Reacquired FirstMile from Rakuten in a deal announced on 1 August 2022, and acquired Rakuten Super Logistics the following day, renaming it ShipNetwork.
• Finalist for EY Entrepreneur Of The Year 2018 in the Utah Region; FirstMile was named to Utah’s Fast 50 fastest-growing companies list in 2023.

Professional Journey

Johnson founded FirstMile in 2014 in Salt Lake City. The premise was that mid-sized e-commerce sellers were structurally disadvantaged in parcel shipping: they were too small to negotiate meaningful rates with any one national carrier, and too large for retail pricing to be tolerable. FirstMile’s answer was Xparcel, a patented ship method that treated carrier selection as a per-package optimisation problem — cost, transit time and destination evaluated for each label, with the shipper handing over a single pickup and a single interface. The company grew to more than 1,500 clients and sorting capacity measured in the thousands of packages per hour per facility, and Johnson was a finalist for EY Entrepreneur Of The Year in the Utah Region in 2018.

In 2019 Rakuten acquired FirstMile, buying it together with the fulfilment company IFS360 and placing it alongside Rakuten Super Logistics, the Las Vegas-based order-fulfilment operation that served Rakuten.com and merchants on Shopify, Amazon, Walmart Marketplace and eBay.

The 2022 transactions are the pivot of his career. On 1 August 2022 he announced he had bought FirstMile back from Rakuten, describing it as “a reinvestment in our commitment to support small, medium and large eCommerce companies.” The next day it emerged that he had also acquired Rakuten Super Logistics outright and renamed it ShipNetwork — the executive of an acquired company buying his acquirer’s fulfilment business. Terms were not disclosed for either deal. He held the title of CEO and owner of both firms, and framed the logic as network density: clients of each business would add volume the other could route, lowering cost and improving service on both sides.

What happened to FirstMile after that is only partly documented. By August 2025 it was one of three companies — with the small-business shipping platform Sendle and the USPS consolidator ACI Logistix — merged into a new entity called FAST Group, intended as a unified North American parcel distribution platform. No public source I could locate states when or how Johnson divested it. The merger did not hold. On 12 January 2026 Sendle abruptly stopped taking bookings, and on 13 January FAST Group announced it was winding down with immediate effect, saying it had been “unable to secure the capital required to sustain operations.” FirstMile’s website now carries a notice that it is no longer operating as an active business. Johnson is not named anywhere in the closure coverage.

ShipNetwork continues. Its own materials describe a national 3PL of more than 250 people with a 97% client retention rate and an average client relationship of eight years, and list Johnson as chief executive officer at the head of the leadership team.

Education

No education could be established from any primary or editorial source. Aggregator listings assert a Utah State University degree, but that claim could not be corroborated and is not recorded here.