Wisetech Cargowise

What they actually do

WiseTech predominantly operates under the CargoWise brand, delivering enterprise freight forwarders with an industry-specific ERP alternative. A freight forwarder has to touch a dozen different systems: booking cargo space on a ship, filing customs paperwork in two or three countries, invoicing the customer, tracking the container, paying the trucking company on the last leg, and reconciling all of it for accounting. CargoWise is the single piece of software where all of that lives, instead of being scattered across spreadsheets, email, and country-specific customs software.

Product Innovation

WiseTech’s original founding innovation was an industry-specific dedicated system, versus a generic horizontal ERP system such as SAP or Oracle. It further differentiated itself by moving into, and being an early cloud provider to compete with traditional on-premise installations.

However, similar, but different than Descartes, the brilliance is the interconnectedness of this industry. CargoWise is a single, unified platform built from one codebase. They emphasize a unified single-platform architecture designed for enterprise-scale global forwarders, managing operations from quoting to tracking within one system. Descartes is the opposite by design: it's grown through an acquisition-led strategy, giving it a broader but more fragmented product suite of separately-acquired tools (customs compliance, denied-party screening, a forwarder TMS, tracking tools like MacroPoint) that get stitched together rather than natively built as one thing.

If two of those companies both run CargoWise, a booking one party creates is immediately visible to the other party, because they're both plugged into the same underlying platform and data model. So the value comes from your trading partners being on the same software as you. On the other hand, with Descartes you don't need the other party to be a Descartes customer for the network to have value to you. You just need Descartes to already have a connection built to whatever system they use.

Scaling Magic Moment

As is common in many of these vertical giants, the first 20 years of WiseTech were rather uneventful. In fact, it wasn’t until 2013 that the company crossed $40M in annual revenue.

From 2016 to 2019, the Company saw growth accelerate up to 50% while already at a meaningful scale. The narrative for WisTech is less one brilliant moment or move, but rather the compounding effect of the network, acquisitions, and some industry tailwinds.

In 2016, the US developed a new customs system (ACE) that forced a lot of upgrades and was a meaningful tailwind. Both leading into this period, and subsequent, WiseTech made over 40 acquisitions. While some are meaningful, many were small tuck-in acquisitions for revenue where solutions were dissolved and the customers were rolled into the CargoWise platform.

The combination of those tailwinds and acquisition strategy allowed CargoWise to consistently increase its market share. Today they are being used by 24 of the top 25 global freight forwarders and 46 of the top 50 3PLs. While companies can have very strong growth periods, an alternative strategy to reach large scale is very strong growth persistence (the relationship between two growth periods). In the case of WiseTech, part of their brilliance has been maintaining an incredibly steady +30% growth rate for over ten years.

Where are they now

Today, WiseTech is traded on the Australian stock exchange with an enterprise value of over $15B. In May 2025, WiseTech acquired e2open, the third largest vendor in this market. This acquisition almost doubled WiseTech revenue, with the combined company approaching $1.5B in annual revenue.

What is their AI narrative?

WiseTech believes that being the system of record with a unified code base puts them in a strong position to deliver agentic experiences. The marketed products are agents that reduce human workflows within the product, particularly in the area of ingesting documents rapidly, performing customs classification with higher accuracy and speed, assessing trade compliance risk in real time. More ambitiously, the company has publicly stated the intent to replace its seat-based model with CargoWise Value Packs where customers pay on agentic consumption.