Itch startup of the month.

• Author: PETERSON, ERIC
• Position: Brief Article

INITIAL LIGHTBULB: GriZella--which took its moniker from an alien race once employed by Star Trek's Captain Picard as a third-party mediator -- was born when each of its three founders looked to embark on new chapters in their respective entrepreneurial careers. Jon Draeb and NIK Hultgren were leaving Visual Movement, a Golden-based IT consulting firm catering to the transportation industry. At the same time, Draeb's brother, Mark, had reached a crossroads in his own career. So the three put their heads together to form GriZella Corp., a software provider for the freight-transportation industry.

IN A NUTSHELL: GriZella's first product is Post Everywhere -- a software tool designed to streamline the freight-carrier industry's spot market. "You'll have a (truck) driver who'll arrive in Denver, drop off a load -- he wants to get back a full load for his return trip," said Jon Draeb, VP of information systems. "One of the first things he does is call his partners. If they can't get anything at that point, they go out to these posting Web sites and post their equipment and where they want to go."

The problem, Draeb explained, is that there are now 160 different posting sites, each with its own format and business model, and it takes administrative manpower to tend to the task. GriZella's Post Everywhere minimizes this headache by using one peer-to-peer application to manage the entire posting process. "Relatively small brokers spend four hours at the end of the day messing around with this stuff," said Draeb. With Post Everywhere, "They don't have to do duplicate entry, they don't have to baby-sit the thing -- they just have to say go.

In tune with the industry prerequisite for affordable software, Post Everywhere will be available on a $ 15 per user-month subscription.

The GriZella team is developing new products that will utilize the same infrastructure that underpins Post Everywhere. "From here, we're going to be able to roll out product after product very quickly," said Jon Draeb.

THE MARKET: GriZella is targeting transportation brokers (the intermediaries between the shippers and the carriers), 20,000 companies that brought in $64 billion in revenues last year and spent roughly $1 billion on information technology. While this intermediary segment is dwarfed by the $400 billion freight carrier market, it also operates on considerably...