Repower's TOP platform cuts trailer repositioning costs for carriers
Chattanooga startup automates trailer moves from surplus to deficit markets. Free to sign up, pricing scales with fleet size and move volume.
Repower's new Trailer Optimization Platform (TOP) automates trailer repositioning from surplus markets to deficit ones, cutting the loadaway costs, empty miles, and fuel spend that carriers rack up balancing their trailer pools. The platform is free to sign up at repowr.com, with pricing that scales by fleet size and move volume. Repower has already executed more than 75,000 moves through its marketplace and returned $30 million in shared revenue to trailer owners.
How much does trailer repositioning cost a carrier?
A dry van trailer that cost $10,000 at the start of drop-and-hook operations now runs $50,000 depending on tariff conditions, according to Chris Hines, CEO of Repower. Large carriers routinely run trailer-to-truck ratios of 2.5 to 3 to 1. A fleet of 1,000 trucks could be managing 2,500 or more trailers, often tracked across a patchwork of TMS records, spreadsheets, and whiteboards. Trailers sit empty 30% to 40% of their working lives, sometimes more.
Repositioning spend includes loadaway costs (paying another carrier to move the trailer), empty miles driven by company drivers, and fuel. Hines framed the ROI calculation around total repositioning spend. "Everything else is optimized in our chain," Hines said. "The gates are optimized, the dock's optimized, the truck's optimized, loads, fuel, but the trailers just lag behind."
What TOP does for a carrier's trailer operations
TOP ingests data feeds from existing carrier systems and consolidates them into a single view of short and long trailer markets. The platform then automates moves to balance those positions, including building or breaking down trailer pools tied to new shipper contracts.
Repower built TOP over roughly 90 days using six proof-of-concept customers. The company embedded its team directly in carrier trailer operations departments to shape the product. Two of those six POC customers have since converted to paying accounts.
Carriers still managing trailers in multiple disparate systems (some in the TMS, some in spreadsheets, some on whiteboards) feed all of those sources into TOP. The platform builds the short and long markets and automates moves from surplus to deficit locations. Because Repower already operates a trailer marketplace, it has the execution layer to move trailers without the carrier having to broker each repositioning move separately.
Vetting and fraud protection for trailer rentals
Hines addressed a growing fraud problem in the trailer rental space, where carriers are transacting through informal channels such as WhatsApp and Facebook. Over the past year, Repower built a security and vetting layer into its platform through partnerships with Highway, Genlogs, and Katina.
"It's not enough for the beneficial trailer owner who brings it to the one side of our marketplace to know where that trailer is 80% of the time," Hines said. "They have to know 100% of the time."
Demand carriers (typically small fleets) must clear the vetting process before accessing any listed asset. Both trailer tracking and ELD data are used for continuous monitoring. Hines pointed to Convoy's collapse, which left an estimated 8,000 trailers unaccounted for, as a cautionary example of what happens when trailer management is treated as an afterthought.
Regional pooling and what comes next
Hines said TOP is a first step toward regional pooling of trailer assets, similar to how chassis pools operate in intermodal. Under that model, carriers, brokers, and shippers could share trailer capacity on a utilization basis regardless of which company owns the equipment.
For a 1-to-10-truck fleet, the trailer math is simpler but the same problem applies. A 5-truck fleet running a 2.5-to-1 ratio is managing 12 or 13 trailers. If those trailers sit idle 30% of the time, that's four trailers not earning. Repositioning those four trailers manually (paying a loadaway or deadheading a driver) eats into the monthly nut. Automating the move through a platform that already has the marketplace and the vetting layer cuts the time and the cost.
Repower's commercial model scales with fleet size and move volume. Carriers walk through an onboarding process after registering at repowr.com. The platform is free to sign up. Pricing kicks in based on how many trailers the carrier moves and how often.
