Europe’s transportation market is quietly approaching a structural turning point, one that doesn’t involve new engines, hydrogen corridors, or autonomous convoys, but people—specifically, who gets to sit behind the wheel. The EU is moving toward opening its internal market to non-European truck drivers, a step that acknowledges something logistics operators have been muttering about for years at truck stops and boardrooms alike: the driver shortage is no longer cyclical, it’s demographic and chronic.

The past stretch of tech events didn’t feel like fireworks so much as pressure building under the surface. Across conference halls, demo stages, and side rooms with bad coffee and very good conversations, a few patterns kept repeating. AI was everywhere, obviously, but the tone has changed. Less hype theater, more operational realism. Speakers talked less about what models might do someday and more about what breaks when you actually deploy them at scale: power draw, latency, governance, cost ceilings that sneak up on you three quarters later.

The ship in the image feels deliberately unflashy, and that’s part of what makes it interesting. Ital Way sits heavy in the water, stacked but not towering, its Evergreen containers arranged in disciplined blocks that look substantial without tipping into excess. The hull’s green cuts cleanly through a slightly fogged seascape, the horizon softened, almost undecided. A few small sailboats drift in the distance, which makes the scale difference obvious but not theatrical.

For a while, container shipping forgot what normal felt like. Extraordinary profits blurred into strategy, and what began as an emergency response to pandemic chaos slowly hardened into a belief that the industry had been permanently re-rated. Now the correction is arriving, not with a crash but with a long, grinding realization that the rules never actually changed. The “structural reset” language coming out of industry circles is less a forecast than an admission: the supercycle is done, and carriers are being dragged back into a business model they briefly escaped.

At Manifest 2026, Dispatch Science chose a big stage for a very pointed message: the way last-mile carriers run technology has been broken for a long time, and incremental fixes are no longer enough. Instead of adding yet another layer to the familiar patchwork of transportation management systems, integrations, analytics tools, and custom scripts, the company unveiled a unified logistics platform designed to collapse those layers into a single operational core.

Gather AI has closed a $40 million Series B round that feels less like a routine growth raise and more like a marker that Physical AI is graduating into a core layer of industrial infrastructure. The round is led by Smith Point Capital Management, with participation from Bain Capital Ventures, Tribeca Venture Partners, Bling Capital, Dundee Venture Capital, XRC Ventures, and new investor The Hillman Company. With this round, total funding reaches $74 million, a figure that neatly tracks the company’s shift from promising pilot deployments into something that looks a lot like an emerging system of record for warehouses.

TIR in transportation stands for Transports Internationaux Routiers, a French term that loosely translates to “International Road Transport,” and it refers to a global customs transit system designed to make cross-border trucking faster, simpler, and a lot less bureaucratic. When you see a truck with a blue TIR plate on the back, it means that the cargo is moving under an international guarantee system that allows it to pass through multiple countries without unloading or undergoing full customs inspections at every border, which is honestly a small miracle if you’ve ever watched a line of trucks crawl across a frontier.

Fleetzero’s $43 million Series A round lands at an interesting moment for global shipping, when decarbonization has moved from aspirational slide decks into the uncomfortable territory of real hardware, real costs, and real deployment risk. This is no longer about futuristic vessels gliding silently across oceans in promotional videos; it’s about whether the industry can actually build, scale, and operate new propulsion systems at volumes that matter. Fleetzero is clearly positioning itself on that fault line, not just announcing capital but pairing it with a new manufacturing and R&D headquarters in Houston, a city whose identity is deeply tied to heavy industry, energy systems, and things that are built to last, not just to demo.

Set against the early-February calm of London, when the city feels sharp, focused, and oddly receptive to big ideas, The Delivery Conference 2026 returns to the Royal Lancaster Hotel with the quiet confidence of an event that knows exactly what it is. On 2–3 February, Metapack and ShipStation will once again draw senior leaders from retail, ecommerce, and logistics into the same rooms, the same conversations, the same slightly over-strong coffees between sessions.

TIER IV, long recognized as a pioneering force behind open-source autonomous driving, has invested in Turing Drive, a Taiwan-based startup focused on autonomous systems for geofenced, low-speed environments. The two companies have established both a capital and business alliance, signaling an intent not just to collaborate on technology, but to align roadmaps, markets, and execution across Asia. It’s the kind of partnership that makes sense when you look closely: deep software DNA on one side, hard-earned field experience on the other, meeting right where real deployments actually happen.