Transloader Software Company ‘Goes Where We’re Pulled’

Kenneth Bautista said he stumbled into the logistics business.

“The barge guys I’ve been talking to tell me you are either born into this business, or you stumble into it,” he said. He had just had lunch with one river terminal operator the previous day and was scheduled to talk to another the next day.

Bautista is head of business operations at Rebulk, a brand-new startup founded in 2025 and headquartered in Kansas City, Mo. He describes Rebulk as a software company that works with transloaders, river terminals and rail operators to accurately track bulk inventory, run daily operations and handle everything from tracking to bills of lading and billing.

“Over the past year we built what we think is the largest open dataset of transloader facilities in the country,” he told The Waterways Journal. He wants his company to get more involved with the barge side of transloading.

How did he “stumble” into logistics? He and his teammates — Warren Wang and Cole Robertson — had developed software that more accurately measure piles of bulk products like grain feed and fertilizer, cargoes that barges specialize in.

Existing methods of calculating and measuring exact volumes and weights were either time-consuming (like moving a multi-ton pile from one side of a laydown yard to another, weighing each load individually, which can “take days,” Bautista said, and are not cost-effective), or inaccurate by as much as 10 to 15 percent.

Rebulk did a pilot project with Cargill, using computer vision, Lidar and drones, along with Rebulk’s proprietary software, to more accurately measure piles of bulk feed in dairies. That led Bautista to wonder about the journeys of those piles. Trucks brought them, but where were they before they were loaded onto trucks from trains?

“In a sense, I worked backwards from the ‘last mile’ up the supply chain trail,” said Bautista — like following a river from its mouth to its origin.

The need for stricter bulk measurement seems to be increasingly recognized. Supply chains and their inefficiencies (that are also opportunities for artificial intelligence tools) are drawing interest from a lot of private equity money, Bautista said. Rebulk won startup financing from the prestigious San Francisco-based startup tech funder Y Combinator. Rebulk has also gotten support from Flyover Capital and a venture capital fund called KCRiseFund, founded in 2016 to “fill a gap in strategic capital for local startups.”

Rebulk has developed what Bautista says is “the largest open dataset of transload facilities in the country,” scraping the internet for the information and aggregating it. Facilities post their own information, he said, but aren’t so concerned with their competitors’ information. By “open,” he means public facilities that serve more than one customer; his dataset doesn’t include “unnamed” facilities that are reserved for one customer only “because there’s no point.” But his dataset does include facilities connected to short line as well as Class 1 railroads.

A few things that Bautista has noticed from examining his data:

There are 2,299 “named” or open-access transload facilities across 49 states, and a “meaningful share” of them sit on the inland river system moving product between barge, rail and truck.

By commodity, 1,210 handle dry bulk, 978 handle liquid bulk, 814 handle agriculture and 527 handle aggregates.

On the rail side, 72 percent are served by at least one Class I railroad. “We’re also tracking consolidation, with 18 acquisitions and roll-ups, 20 newly announced terminals and 34 active acquirers so far this year,” Bautista said.

All of Rebulk’s data is public at https://rebulk.com/transload-facilities, including a state of transloading summary, a facility map and breakdowns by railroad, commodity and state. Right now, it’s hard to break out datasets by barge capabilities, but Bautista wants to change that.

According to Bautista, the only other firm that is doing anything comparable to Rebulk is Commtrex, which has a different approach to revenue and marketing.

Bautista attended the Inland Rivers, Ports and Terminals conference recently. He certainly believes in the importance of barge transportation and its place in the larger picture of logistics and supply chains.

“We kind of go where we’re pulled,” as he put it.

That pull increasingly comes from companies seeking a clearer picture of how freight moves between modes and where additional capacity is available. For inland operators, Rebuk’s dataset can provide a broader view of terminals connecting barge traffic with rail and truck transportation. Bautista said the company will continue expanding its data and making facility information easier to search and compare.