The news: Overroute, a new agentic AI freight startup built with J.B. Hunt, launched publicly this week. It is a freight execution platform the carrier co-built over a year. It now runs across all of J.B. Hunt's business units.
Overroute is the first startup out of J.B. Hunt's work with UP.Labs, an outside venture studio the carrier began building in 2024. UP.Labs is run by the VC firm UP.Partners and is not connected to Union Pacific.
J.B. Hunt built the software to run its own freight network. Overroute will now sell it to other carriers, including J.B. Hunt's competitors.
What it does: Overroute uses AI agents. These are programs that carry out multi-step work on their own rather than waiting for a person to click through each step. The agents plug into a carrier’s existing systems, so there is no rip-and-replace. From there, the agents:
read live shipment data;
catch the exceptions that would otherwise sit in someone's inbox;
coordinate scheduling across the load; and
handle customer communications.
The point is to automate the manual coordination work an exception desk does today. This includes the calls and spreadsheets that keep a shipment moving when systems don’t talk to each other.
The scale: J.B. Hunt runs the agents across its intermodal, truckload, dedicated, brokerage, and managed logistics operations. It says they process millions of loads a year.
Overroute CEO Alex Reed said the agents deliver “measurable outcomes.”
J.B. Hunt COO Nick Hobbs said the network's complexity “gives us a unique opportunity to take emerging technology and apply it at real scale.”
The contrast: J.B. Hunt is not the only big asset-based carrier building this. C.H. Robinson runs its own fleet of AI agents that have handled more than 3 million shipping tasks across pricing, order processing, appointments and tracking.
Robinson is keeping its agents in-house, while J.B. Hunt is turning the same capability into a separate company.
What's next: Overroute says it is preparing its next commercial deployments. J.B. Hunt remains its only named live customer.
