The evaluation process is built to elevate true,
needle-moving innovation: Companies are permitted to nominate themselves or
others. Although a single nomination is all that is required for a company to
be considered, the total number of unique nominators is shared with the
evaluation team. FreightWaves’ internal research team, market analysts and
journalists then carefully vet the nominations to select a curated list of the
100 most innovative companies in freight. That list of 100 is then sent to an
independent, external panel of roughly 80 judges – consisting of industry CEOs,
academics, investors and logistics executives. Those judges rank their top 25
choices using a traditional points-tally system supervised and audited by
accounting firm Henderson, Hutcherson & McCullough. The resulting
FreightTech 25 represents the absolute vanguard of logistics engineering,
artificial intelligence and hardware design. The 2026 FreightTech Awards
highlighted a massive shift toward automation, fraud prevention and other advanced
technologies.