Founder Snapshot
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Founder: Josh Lampen, Co-Founder & CTO
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Company: Cartage
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Stage: Seed
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Investors: Y Combinator, Garage Capital
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Founded: 2023
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Previous: Rose Rocket (Engineer)
“The opportunity here is massive. Logistics is the backbone of the North American economy - we’re building technology that could genuinely change how the world works.”
Josh Lampen fell in love with logistics five years ago when he joined Rose Rocket, a Y Combinator-backed freight tech startup, as an engineer. There he met his future co-founder, Abdul Basharat, and they quickly became obsessed with the problem space: a massive industry that keeps the economy moving, yet still runs largely on phone calls, emails, and fax machines.
The spark for Cartage came in mid-2023 with the explosion of Large Language Models. Josh and Abdul realized that the industry’s biggest hurdle - silos of unstructured data trapped in scattered emails, PDFs, and phone conversations - was finally surmountable.
Not Just Code, But “Special Sauce”
When it comes to building the team that will modernize the industry, Josh doesn’t rely on standard metrics. He admits that team building is often gut-based, but he looks for a specific quality in every candidate: intellectual curiosity that translates into action.
“If I come out of an interview and they’ve taught me something I didn’t know, that’s a strong signal,” he explains. “It shows a certain intellectual curiosity about the world and the initiative to actually go deep on things.”
This philosophy has produced a team with uncommon backgrounds: team members who taught themselves new languages, built brain-computer interfaces, and developed video games so successful that rivals tried to sue them. That’s the “special sauce” Josh looks for.
“I care most about what you’ve built from zero to one,” Josh says. “I look at your projects and whether they generated revenue or had real users. I don’t care what school you went to.”
Looking for a Senior Engineer
Cartage is currently scaling toward its Series A milestones, and Josh is focused on finding a Senior Engineer to round out the core team. Given the ambition of their mission - building AI that coordinates the North American supply chain - he’s looking for a certain kind of engineer.
“I’m looking for someone who’s a little bit nuts,” Josh admits. “We want engineers who believe that humans won’t just stop writing their own code - they’ll stop reviewing it too, and eventually stop configuring their agents altogether. And that this will all happen before the end of this year.”
The role demands experience building vertical agents that solve real problems at scale. But more importantly, it requires the courage to operate in high-stakes environments.
“Wilson is actively coordinating hundreds of trucks on highways as we speak,” Josh notes. “If Wilson is wrong, bad things happen. We need engineers who are ambitious, motivated by real-world problems, and who understand what’s at stake.”
Beyond building the product, the team also serves as trusted advisors to their customers. “We’re not just selling Wilson. We’re educators of AI,” Josh explains. “We help our customers understand the best way to integrate these solutions into their supply chain.”
A Real-World Mission
For engineers considering their next move, Josh emphasizes the tangible impact of the work. Unlike startups tackling theoretical or academic problems, Cartage is deployed in the physical world, managing critical infrastructure.
“Ambitious engineers gravitate toward the scale of the problem we’re solving,” says Josh. “This isn’t a dev tool - it’s technology that businesses rely on every day to run their operations, and it could genuinely change how the world moves goods.”
The team operates out of a new office in San Francisco, working closely together and pushing each other to move fast. For Josh, the excitement for the year ahead stems directly from the people around him.
“The people I work with inspire me. I get so much energy from them,” he reflects. “What excites me most this year is seeing what we’ll achieve as a team.”
Learn More
Cartage is building the AI infrastructure to automate and coordinate the global supply chain.
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Website: https://cartage.ai
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Connect with Josh: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshlampen/
