Nick Darman

Founder & CEO Alvys

Last Reviewed: September 19, 2026

Executive Summary

Nick Darman is the founder and chief executive of Alvys, a cloud transportation management system that began life as internal software he built to run his own freight brokerage. That origin is the whole argument for the company. Trucking software has historically been written by software companies for an industry they do not work in, producing systems that model freight the way a database designer imagines it rather than the way a dispatcher actually moves a load. Darman built his TMS in 2017 because nothing on the market matched how his brokerage operated; it scaled that business to roughly $90-100 million in annual revenue, and in 2020 he and co-founder Leo Gorodinski — previously VP of Engineering at Jet.com — turned the tool into a product. Alvys now serves more than 3,000 companies with over 150 employees, has raised $77 million across three rounds, and has extended into agentic AI with Alvys Foundry, a platform for deploying automation agents inside the TMS with explicit spend controls, audit trails and approval gates. Darman himself came to the industry through his family: his father was a truck driver, and he started dispatching for the family business while studying economics at Georgia State.

Career Highlights

• Co-founded Alvys in 2020 with CTO Leo Gorodinski, formerly VP of Engineering at Jet.com.
• Built the underlying transportation management system in 2017 for his own asset-based brokerage before commercialising it.
• Grew Alvys to 3,000+ companies served and 150+ employees.
• Raised $77 million in total: a $6.3 million seed led by Bonfire Ventures with RTP Global participating; a $25.8 million Series A in July 2024 led by Titanium Ventures; and a $40 million Series B announced on 29 September 2025 led by RTP Global, with Alpha Square Group, Titanium Ventures, Picus Capital and Bonfire Ventures also participating.
• Launched Alvys Foundry, an AI agent platform embedded in the TMS, with more than 20 pre-built agents covering detention, claims, compliance and tracking, plain-language custom agent creation, and an “Agent Shield” safety layer.
• Delivered measured customer outcomes of a 28% increase in monthly loads and a 9% revenue improvement.
• Recurring speaker at FreightWaves events and on trucking podcasts, and a published columnist on freight technology and brokerage operations.

Professional Journey

Darman’s route into logistics was not a career choice so much as a family circumstance. His father was a truck driver, as were his uncles, and while he was studying economics at Georgia State University from around 2004 he began dispatching for the family trucking business — learning the operational core of freight at the sharp end, matching loads and drivers, before he had any professional standing in the industry at all.

After graduating he went to J.P. Morgan. He has described the value of that period in specific terms: it taught him to understand and operate complex international systems. It is an unusual credential for a freight founder and it is the one that distinguishes him from most of the industry’s software entrepreneurs, who arrive either from trucking without systems thinking or from technology without operational experience. Darman had both, in that order.

He went back to freight. By 2014 he had established an asset-based brokerage of his own, and immediately hit the constraint that eventually became his company. The available transportation management systems did not correspond to how his operation actually ran. Dispatch, compliance, settlement and accounting lived in separate tools that did not reconcile, and the workflow assumptions baked into each of them were somebody else’s. In 2017 he assembled a team and built his own TMS from scratch to run the brokerage. It worked: the business scaled to roughly $90-100 million in annual revenue on the back of it, with company-supplied sources giving the figure slightly differently.

The decision to commercialise came in 2020. Darman partnered with Leo Gorodinski, who had been VP of Engineering at Jet.com — the e-commerce company Walmart acquired for $3.3 billion — as co-founder and CTO, and launched Alvys as a product. The pitch was the origin story: freight people building freight technology, aimed particularly at the carriers and small brokers that enterprise TMS vendors had never bothered to serve properly. The platform covers dispatching, a driver mobile app, compliance, accounting, reporting, native EDI and more than 120 integrations in one system rather than as separately sold modules.

Capital followed the traction. A $6.3 million seed round led by Bonfire Ventures, with RTP Global participating, was followed in July 2024 by a $25.8 million Series A led by Titanium Ventures, and on 29 September 2025 by a $40 million Series B led by RTP Global with Alpha Square Group, Titanium Ventures, Picus Capital and Bonfire Ventures joining — $77 million in total. By that point Alvys was serving more than 3,000 companies with over 150 employees, headquartered in Solana Beach, California, and reporting customer outcomes of 28% more monthly loads and a 9% revenue gain.

The most recent phase is agentic automation. Alvys Foundry lets operators deploy AI agents inside the TMS — more than twenty pre-built for standard workflows such as detention, claims, compliance and tracking, plus custom agents described in plain language. What is notable about it, and consistent with Darman’s operator background, is the emphasis on restraint rather than autonomy: Agent Shield imposes spend controls, logged and traceable decisions, and approval gates before high-impact actions. It is a design made by someone who has had to explain a bad dispatch decision to a customer. Alongside the product work he has stayed publicly visible, writing on automating standard operating procedures, on choosing a TMS, and on the damage siloed technology does to trucking companies, and appearing regularly at FreightWaves events and on industry podcasts.

Education

Georgia State University

Economics. Sources state that Darman studied economics at Georgia State from around 2004 and earned a degree in the subject; no source specifies the degree level, and none is asserted here.