Logistics · Deep dive

ClearJet

A carrier-agnostic 'SuperCarrier' that stuffs ecommerce parcels into unused belly cargo on scheduled flights, then hands them to regional final-mile carriers — 30M+ packages a year, 95 airports, and a deep graveyard behind anyone who has tried this before.

emerging

The question that decides it: Can a carrier-agnostic belly-cargo aggregator hold a price and volume advantage over three simultaneous compressors — USPS Ground Advantage pricing the floor, Amazon Supply Chain Services eating the top of the market, and passenger airlines re-monetising belly capacity directly — long enough to reach the ~100M-parcel run-rate at which its own middle-mile becomes an asset instead of a rental? Answer conditions: (a) demonstrated cost-per-package materially below FedEx Ground and USPS Ground Advantage at scale, with published or leaked unit economics rather than percentage claims; (b) 100M+ parcel run-rate within 24 months of the Aug 2026 round; (c) contractual defence — multi-year committed capacity from at least two majors, or exclusive last-mile injection rights with OnTrac-tier carriers beyond the 2026 launch; (d) survival of a cross-border tariff or trade-war shock that pulls low-value ecommerce parcels out of the mix. Fail any two and the model becomes a feature of the integrator or airline that wants it.

My take ★★ Very interesting ★ Interesting − Maybe ✗ Not interesting

Snapshot

ClearJet sells ecommerce brands, 3PLs and regional parcel carriers a two-to-three-day national parcel service at ground-shipping prices, by cross-docking packages into unused belly cargo on scheduled passenger flights and handing them to regional last-mile carriers on the other end. Founded in 2022 in Austin by serial commerce founder Chris Guggenheim, the company raised a $25M Series B led by Edison Partners on August 12, 2026 — bringing total funding above $40M — and says it now moves more than 30M packages a year through a 95-airport network, with volume and revenue growing 2.5x annually and the P&L in the black (Crunchbase News, Aug 12 2026). Elegant logic. Deep graveyard behind it.

Founding story

Guggenheim did not come out of freight. In 2010 he founded ONELIVE, a direct-to-fan ecommerce platform that grew into Shopify Plus’s largest value-add reseller, running merch stores for Willie Nelson, Zac Brown Band, Keith Urban, UFC/Legends Sports and hundreds of other IP owners. A decade on Shopify’s rails taught him the expensive lesson: shipping was the line item that ate the margin, and after 2020 the most volatile number on the P&L.

In 2020 ONELIVE spun out X Delivery, an asset-light “next-generation express parcel carrier” combining third-party lift with proprietary tech — the direct prototype. ClearJet, launched publicly in mid-2023, is the version with scope broadened from ONELIVE’s own volume to any shipper’s. The operating team is heavier on carrier operators than software — Sean O’Connor (SVP Parcel), Daniel Sayne (SVP Sales), Jason Buedel (pricing), Jay Winters (CTO) — the familiar pattern of a founder-as-customer flanked by people who did the job before.

How it works

ClearJet owns essentially no planes and no trucks. It runs sortation and staging at consolidation facilities near 95 US airports, tenders parcels into cargo hold space on scheduled passenger and cargo flights already crossing US cities, and either hands them off to regional last-mile carriers at destination or meets the aircraft with its own drivers. Per its own framing (FreightWaves, 2024) it books against roughly 9,000 daily narrowbody flights — the Boeing 737 / A320 fleets — filling the belly with revenue-producing cargo instead of empty air.

A typical flow: a shipper’s warehouse hands packages to a regional first-mile trucker under ClearJet’s contract; the trucker runs them to a ClearJet consolidation hub near the origin airport; ClearJet sorts and screens, trucks to the airport, and tenders as air cargo; on arrival, it injects into a regional last-mile — OnTrac, Veho, LSO, GLS — or runs the last mile itself. Track and trace runs via ClearJet’s own APIs and, since October 2024, a formal integration with Shipium.

Two things sit under the diagram. First, this is a regulated business: any entity tendering freight onto US passenger aircraft holds a TSA Indirect Air Carrier certificate under 49 CFR Part 1548 and screens cargo under the CCSP. Approval runs 90-120 days and the security program is annual — a real barrier to any Shopify plug-in that wanted to compete, and a compliance load that scales badly. Second, the “AI-powered logistics platform” the Series B press leans on is a routing and pricing engine that picks airport pair, airline, last-mile carrier and service level per parcel to hit a promised transit time at lowest cost. Published 98.5% on-time and 30%+ cost advantage versus express hub-and-spoke; neither number is independently audited.

Product and business overview

Three named products sit on top of the same infrastructure. ClearJet Express is the flagship: door-to-door 2-3 day parcel shipping at ground rates, sold direct to ecommerce shippers. Air Zone Skip is the wholesale version — inject at origin, hand off to the shipper’s existing last-mile at destination, keep their carrier relationships intact. This is what Shipium plugs into and what 3PLs prefer. SuperCarrier is the umbrella brand: any shipper can assemble its own “carrier” out of ClearJet’s air lift, sortation, staffing and regional last-mile partners.

The partnership that matters most is OnTrac. In September 2025, OnTrac announced OnTrac Express, a hybrid 2-3 day service with ClearJet as exclusive launch partner, going live in early 2026. Two-way dependency: ClearJet gets guaranteed last-mile volume; OnTrac gets a national reach it cannot afford to build. Whether the exclusivity holds past launch is one of the load-bearing questions in the file.

Business model and pricing

ClearJet does not publish rate cards; enterprise pricing is quoted per lane and per volume through a lead form. The shape, per FreightWaves and the company’s own material: tiered by weight and zone against a FedEx Ground / UPS Ground baseline, positioned 30%+ below express hub-and-spoke for equivalent 2-3 day service. Revenue is booked per shipment, with commercial-air cargo capacity purchased from airlines at wholesale.

Crunchbase News reported at the Series B (Aug 12 2026) that revenue was growing 2.5x annually, “approaching nine figures”, and that the company was profitable — an unusual claim for a challenger carrier that Edison Partners, which typically underwrites capital-efficient growth stories, appears to have accepted. Two disciplines a reader should apply. The 2.5x is a rate, not a level; “approaching nine figures” suggests $60-90M of revenue, but that is inferred. And the profitability claim turns on how ClearJet accounts for the fixed costs of its consolidation hubs, sortation labour and TSA compliance — the same P&L structure looked defensible at Pilot Freight until Maersk paid $1.7B for it and quietly buried the brand.

Traction over time

Two caveats. The 30M-parcel figure is a company number with no independent audit. And the jump from 9 airports (2024) to 95 (2026) is aggressive — a real network requires hub staffing, sortation equipment, TSA-approved screening and regional carrier contracts at each node — and a diligent underwriter would push on how deep the network is at each of the 95 versus how many are effectively pass-through arrangements with an airline handler.

Market analysis

Company frame: global parcel projected at ~$900B by 2032. For a US operator: US parcel is ~$180B; ecommerce parcels ~$120B; FedEx Ground alone did ~$32B in FY25 (SEC 10-K, Jun 2025). Pitney Bowes’ 2026 Parcel Shipping Index and DC Velocity (Dec 2025) put USPS at ~31% of US parcel volume, UPS ~20-23%, FedEx ~15%, and Amazon at more than any of them once captive volume is counted. ClearJet pegs the “air-eligible” opportunity at ~1.8B parcels a year; 30M against that is under 2%.

Structural forces are mixed. Ecommerce parcel growth is still positive but no longer 2020-era. USPS Ground Advantage compresses price at the low end; Amazon Supply Chain Services (2026 launch) compresses choice at the top. US passenger air capacity is near pre-pandemic levels and belly yields have softened — friendly to a middle-mile buyer. On the regulatory side, 2025-26 de minimis reforms pull Shein/Temu-class parcels out of the mix, a headwind for anyone whose lanes carry them.

Competitive intel

Six directions of attack.

FedEx Ground and UPS Ground — the reference product. Neither has aggressively cut ground pricing; both have every reason to if a challenger drives a 30% wedge in.

USPS Ground Advantage — since July 2023, the aggressive floor on lightweight parcel pricing. The problem is not that USPS wins those parcels; it is that USPS pulls the price bottom down on adjacent lanes too.

Amazon Supply Chain Services — the 2026 opening of Amazon’s stack is the biggest new risk. The segment ClearJet targets — brands that on principle will not ship with Amazon — is real, and not growing.

Regional last-mile carriers (OnTrac, LSO, GLS, Spee-Dee, Better Trucks) — partner today, plausible competitor tomorrow. Whether OnTrac renews the Express exclusive once it has learned the playbook is unknowable.

Air-freight forwarders (Forward Air, Ascent Global Logistics, Radiant Logistics) — Forward Air’s 100+ US airport terminals and 40 years of airport-to-airport are a different starting point, adjacent end state.

Airlines going direct (Delta, United, American, IAG Cargo) — the ultimate disintermediation risk. IAG has already launched a cross-border parcel product; Delta and United sell direct into forwarders.

And the ghost in the room: Pilot / Maersk. Pilot Freight was, before Maersk paid $1.7B for it in 2022, exactly the model — asset-light, first/middle/last-mile ecommerce parcel, blended air and ground, national. Maersk absorbed it into Maersk North America, and by 2024 was quietly winding down the standalone brand as freight rates collapsed. The lesson is not that this cannot work; the lesson is that at a mid-cycle downturn the economics are less resilient than they look.

History and evolution

• 2010 — Guggenheim founds ONELIVE, grows it into Shopify Plus’s largest VAR.
• 2020 — ONELIVE spins out X Delivery, an asset-light express parcel operator. The prototype.
• Jul 2022 — ClearJet incorporated in Austin; Guggenheim as founder/CEO.
• 2023 — Public launch; seed round from Sky VC (then JetBlue Ventures) and Tandem Ventures.
• May 21 2024 — $12.3M Series A led by Venture53. Network operating out of nine airports.
• Oct 2024 — Shipium integration goes live.
• Sep 8 2025 — OnTrac announces OnTrac Express with ClearJet as exclusive launch partner.
• Early 2026 — OnTrac Express formally rolls out to shippers.
• Aug 12 2026 — $25M Series B led by Edison Partners; total funding above $40M; 95-airport network; 30M+ parcels/year run-rate.

What people say

The case for. Trade coverage has been favourable and specific. FreightWaves’ 2024 coverage of the narrowbody-belly model treated it as one of the credible responses to structural US parcel inflation; more sceptical writers have granted that the unit economics hold as long as passenger airlines want belly revenue and regional carriers want origin volume. The Sep 2025 OnTrac exclusivity is the single strongest external validation — OnTrac is not a naive buyer of freight tech. Shipium’s partnership (Oct 2024) is quieter but similar: enterprise ecommerce that will not tolerate a fragile carrier. Edison Partners’ Series B lead is a data point about the audited economics outside underwriters have not been shown.

The complaints. Public criticism is thin, itself a warning sign for a Series B: the shipper-side Reddit and forum traffic that would sanity-check a national carrier is largely silent, suggesting ClearJet is not yet at merchant scale. Independent visibility signals are weak — Pendium’s AI Visibility Score sat at 22/100 in mid-2026. The historical analogues are the loudest bear case. Pilot Freight — same shape, more capital, older business — got bought for $1.7B by Maersk in 2022 and then quietly submerged as freight recessions bit. Yellow Corporation collapsed in August 2023 despite decades of scale on the same class of problems: thin margins, fixed cost, cyclical volume. And the recurring critique of every asset-light challenger — CommerceHub, Deliverr — is that carrier promises are only as good as the underlying supplier relationships, which the aggregator does not own. In ClearJet’s case those relationships are airlines with growing digital cargo platforms and regional carriers with an obvious motive to insource.

Outlook: the open question

The question resolves the first quarter a major US passenger airline formally launches its own ecommerce parcel middle-mile product to shippers, or the first quarter Amazon Supply Chain Services publishes a 2-3 day national parcel service at price parity with ground. Either move takes the roof off ClearJet’s addressable market. Neither is speculative: IAG has already done the airline version in Europe; Amazon has already opened its logistics stack.

Bull case. ClearJet compounds volume against the OnTrac exclusive, uses 2.5x growth to lock multi-year committed belly capacity with two or three US carriers at pre-negotiated wholesale, and reaches a 100M+ parcel/year run-rate at which its middle-mile becomes a genuine asset — sortation, screening, staffing and lane density a new entrant cannot replicate in under 24 months. In that world it is either an independent public carrier or the parcel arm a Maersk-scale strategic buys. Edison’s fund shape is more consistent with the second.

Bear case. USPS eats the light end, Amazon Supply Chain Services eats the top, airlines pull cargo back in-house, and OnTrac lets the exclusive lapse in 2027 to point its own trucks at its own middle-mile lanes. The 30M-parcel volume proves thinly distributed across 95 airports rather than concentrated at 15, and fixed-cost drag from TSA-certified rooms swamps the routing engine’s margin. The SuperCarrier becomes a feature of the integrator or airline that wants it, and the $40M runs out at the next round.

What to watch: real cost-per-package rather than percentage-below-express claims; whether OnTrac exclusivity extends past 2027; whether any US passenger airline announces a shipper-direct ecommerce parcel product; whether the profitability claim survives building out 95 airports; and whether the run-rate crosses 100M parcels by mid-2028.

How a challenger would attack it

Attack the rentals, not the routing engine. ClearJet owns almost nothing: the bellies belong to airlines building their own digital cargo platforms, the last mile belongs to OnTrac and its peers, and the defensible middle is a TSA Indirect Air Carrier certificate plus sortation rooms near 95 airports. A challenger doesn’t out-aggregate the aggregator — it buys the supply first. Sign multi-year committed belly capacity with two majors (the contractual defense ClearJet itself hasn’t demonstrated), then undercut on the 15 dense lanes where the volume actually concentrates rather than matching a 95-airport map that is likely thin pass-through at most nodes. The alternative attack is from below: a Forward Air-style operator with 100+ existing airport terminals already owns the physical footprint ClearJet is still capitalizing with $40M of venture money, and needs only the parcel-grade routing software — the cheapest part of the stack to replicate in 2026. The pressure point is pricing: ClearJet’s 30%-below-express claim exists inside a FedEx/UPS pricing umbrella; a targeted ground-rate cut on air-eligible lanes, or Amazon Supply Chain Services publishing 2-3 day at ground parity, deletes the wedge without anyone attacking ClearJet directly. Finally, its 98.5% on-time and profitability claims are unaudited — a challenger that publishes real per-package unit economics wins the 3PL procurement conversation on transparency alone.

Same playbook, new buyer

The belly-cargo arbitrage generalizes wherever scheduled lift flies empty past time-sensitive goods. The most promising shift is cross-border intra-regional: Mexico-US nearshoring lanes and intra-Southeast-Asia ecommerce, where no USPS Ground Advantage sets a price floor and no Amazon logistics stack yet dominates — the compressors squeezing ClearJet’s US market simply don’t exist there, though customs replaces TSA as the compliance moat. Second, change the cargo: healthcare and pharma cold-chain parcels, aircraft-on-ground parts, and perishables pay multiples of ecommerce yields for the same 2-3 day belly transit, and the buyer is a procurement department, not a price-shopping Shopify merchant. Third, sell the software: license the per-parcel routing-and-pricing engine to regional carriers and forwarders as infrastructure rather than competing with them — the Shipium integration shows the plumbing already exists. ClearJet can’t chase these itself: it is a ~60-90 person company defending a US network build against three simultaneous compressors, its OnTrac exclusive tethers it to US domestic ecommerce, and every dollar of the $25M Series B is committed to deepening the 95 airports it already announced.

Sources and further reading

• ClearJet Secures $25M Growth Investment Led by Edison Partners to Scale its SuperCarrier Network (Edison Partners / BusinessWire, Aug 12 2026) — primary Series B announcement, 95-airport / 30M-parcel numbers
• Exclusive: ClearJet raises $25M to build the ‘Uber of Cargo’ (Crunchbase News, Aug 12 2026) — 2.5x growth, profitability, “approaching nine figures” revenue
• ClearJet Raises $25M to Rethink Air-to-Ground Parcel Delivery Networks (Sourcing Journal, Aug 12 2026)
• Clearjet leverages narrowbody aircraft for air parcel service at ground rates (FreightWaves, 2024) — best public account of the physical mechanics at Series A scale
• OnTrac Announces Express Service with ClearJet as Exclusive Launch Partner (PR Newswire / OnTrac, Sep 8 2025)
• Shipium Helps ClearJet Unleash Their Super Carrier Infrastructure (PR Newswire / Shipium, Oct 2024)
• Why We Invested in ClearJet (Sky VC / JetBlue Ventures, 2024) — seed-stage investor thesis
• ClearJet — Crunchbase company profile (Crunchbase, accessed Aug 2026) — funding history
• Amazon Supply Chain Services expands to full third-party logistics (Air Cargo News, May 2026)
• US Postal Service sees volume gains in package shipping (Supply Chain Dive, 2024-25) — USPS Ground Advantage share dynamics
• TSA Cargo Programs — Indirect Air Carrier and Certified Cargo Screening (TSA, current) — regulatory frame ClearJet operates under