About RouteLyft
Built in Hamburg.
For the freight corridors
that run through it.
Founded in 2024. Bootstrapped. Operating at the intersection of EU freight and real-time data infrastructure.
Our story
We got tired of explaining delays we couldn't see coming
Thomas Bergmann spent eight years working in freight forwarding operations across Northern Europe — the last four at a mid-size Hamburg forwarder managing cross-border lanes into Poland, the Czech Republic, and the Baltics. The job wasn't lack of data. The job was that the data lived in six places at once: the carrier's tracking portal, the national NCTS transit system, the FMS telematics app, the customs broker's email, a shared spreadsheet, and the client's own WMS. When a T1 transit document hit a customs hold at Görlitz or Terespol, a coordinator could be four hours behind the fact — finding out when the consignee called, not when the event happened.
In early 2024, Thomas and Mia Köhler — formerly a data infrastructure engineer who had built real-time event pipelines at a Hamburg-based 3PL — started building the layer that stitches those feeds together. The core idea was not a new TMS. It was a data aggregation pipeline specifically designed for the three feed types that drive EU cross-border exceptions: telematics position streams (CAN bus/FMS), EU customs API events (NCTS Phase 5, AES), and carrier ETA messages (IFTSTA/REST).
RouteLyft launched its beta in late 2024. We're working with freight forwarders and 3PL operators across Northern and Central Europe who are running EU cross-border lanes and want exception detection in minutes, not hours.
RouteLyft is a freight visibility platform. We do not move freight, broker loads, or operate as a carrier. We connect to the data feeds you already work with and surface exceptions. That is all we do — and we think that's enough.
Hamburg HafenCity — RouteLyft HQ is at Am Sandtorkai 72, a short walk from the container terminal.
What we believe
Data discipline over dashboards
Freight visibility tools that show you data 12 hours late aren't visibility tools — they're historical records. We build for the operational window that actually matters.
Operational honesty
Batch-updated tracking data is not visibility — it's a delayed audit trail. Every feed we integrate must meet a freshness standard. If a carrier delivers position reports on a 4-hour polling cycle rather than real-time, we label it clearly rather than show stale data with a live-looking timestamp.
Coordinators first
Every product decision runs through one question: does this make an ops coordinator's morning better? We don't build features for demo slides. We build them for the 07:00 dashboard check on a Monday with fourteen cross-border shipments in transit and two already flagged amber.
EU-first architecture
Shipment data contains commercially sensitive information — cargo values, trading partner identities, route patterns. RouteLyft is built on EU data residency, GDPR-compliant data processing agreements (Article 28 DPAs available on all paid plans), and minimal retention from the first line of code. No data leaves the EEA.
The team
Small team, sharp focus
We're a focused team of three, combining freight operations expertise with data engineering and product design.
Thomas Bergmann
CEO & Co-Founder
Eight years in freight forwarding operations in Northern Europe, managing cross-border lanes for road freight across DACH, Poland, and the Baltic corridor. Watched coordinators manually poll five carrier portals every morning before he decided to build something better.
Mia Köhler
CTO & Co-Founder
Data infrastructure engineer specialising in real-time event streaming and ETL pipelines. Previously designed logistics data architecture for a Hamburg 3PL, including their telematics ingest layer and carrier EDI normalisation. Built RouteLyft's core data pipeline from the ground up.
Luca Ferrari
Head of Integrations
Logistics API specialist with hands-on experience connecting EDIFACT IFTSTA/IFTMIN feeds, REST carrier APIs, and FMS telematics endpoints across EU carrier networks. Manages all carrier onboarding, customs API relationships, and new integration scoping.
We'd like to show you what we've built.
Request early access or write directly to Thomas at [email protected]