Cipher & Row

Cipher and Row is a verification platform for the North American freight industry that answers a single, sharp question, can you trust the party on the other end of this load. Load boards are good at posting and matching freight, but they don't tell you whether the carrier or broker you're about to book is legitimate. That gap is where fraud lives, and it's the gap this product sets out to close.

The core workflow is fast. You paste a DOT or MC number and get back a trust score from 0 to 100 along with a plain verdict of Proceed, Caution, or Block. Behind that number sits multi-signal fraud screening rather than a single database lookup, so the score reflects several risk indicators at once instead of one authority check. The aim is to turn a judgment call that used to take phone calls and cross-referencing into something you can read in a moment. One of the harder problems it goes after is the chameleon carrier, an operator that shuts down under a bad record and reappears under a fresh number as if nothing happened. Cipher and Row watches for that pattern of reinvention and flags it, which is exactly the sort of thing a quick authority check on its own tends to miss. Double-broker detection runs on every lookup as well, so re-brokered loads and the risk that comes with them show up before you commit.

The reason speed matters so much is the tempo of the work itself. A dispatcher covering loads is often deciding in minutes, sometimes with a driver already waiting, and there isn't time to call three references before committing. Compressing the check into a single paste and a clear verdict means the safe move and the fast move stop being at odds, which is really the only way a verification step gets used under pressure rather than skipped when the day gets busy.

Coverage spans both sides of the border. A single lookup checks the US FMCSA registry alongside the Canadian ones, including CVOR, NSC, and CTQ, so a dispatcher moving freight between the two countries doesn't have to bounce between systems. For brokers, it also surfaces live BMC-84 bond status, which is one of the details that separates a real broker from a shell.

Verification isn't only a one-time check. You can save a carrier or broker and the platform will alert you when their status, bond, or insurance changes, so a relationship that was clean at booking doesn't quietly go stale. There's also a Packet Scanner that reads onboarding paperwork for fraud signals, scanning a typical packet of up to ten pages for a small number of credits, which brings the same scrutiny to documents that the lookup brings to registration numbers. For teams already running AI assistants, the platform hooks into tools like Claude, ChatGPT, and Cursor through MCP clients. That means a dispatcher or broker can ask an assistant to check a number and pull the score into whatever workflow they're already in, rather than opening a separate tab for every load. It fits the direction a lot of back-office freight work is heading, where the assistant becomes the surface people work through and the verification runs quietly underneath it.

It's built for dispatchers, brokers, and freight companies operating in the United States and Canada, with carriers themselves given free access to run broker lookups. The product also plugs into AI assistants like Claude, ChatGPT, and Cursor through MCP clients, so a team already running an agent can pull verification into that flow rather than switching to a separate tab. On the roadmap, the makers describe what they call Canada's first independent broker registry, issuing CAB IDs, which points at where the coverage is heading next. The credit model ties usage to the work rather than to raw seat count, so a lookup, a monitored partner, and a scanned packet each draw from the same balance. That keeps a small dispatch team on a low tier while a busy brokerage can size up as its volume grows. The forthcoming independent broker registry, issuing what the makers call CAB IDs, points at a longer plan to become a reference source for the industry rather than only a lookup tool bolted onto someone else's data.

Access is freemium. Carriers get free broker lookups, with an optional Verified+ tier at twenty nine dollars a month for monitoring. Dispatchers start at forty nine dollars a month and scale up through higher credit and seat counts, while brokers run on their own set of plans from an essential tier into larger volumes. There's a free tier that allows a handful of lookups each week with no signup, overage is priced per verification once you pass a soft cap, and annual billing carries a discount. Enterprise pricing is custom and handled through sales.