BridgeHarbor opens its trading platform to thirty founding broker desks

BridgeHarbor has opened access to its trading platform for commodity brokers, starting with a cohort of thirty founding desks.

The product is aimed at a narrow user: the broker who arranges the movement of recovered paper, plastics and scrap without owning a yard, running a scale or taking possession of the material. That broker earns on the spread between two weights measured by other people, and carries the paperwork risk sitting behind both.

The problem it targets

The company frames the gap in terms most desks will recognise. A scale ticket reads 42,000 lb. The receiving weight comes back at 38,000. By the time the discrepancy surfaces, the account is closed. Two short tons at $142 is $284 gone from a load that was only ever going to return $412.

The information required to catch that is rarely missing. It is scattered — a release number in one thread, a BOL attached to a three-day-old reply, a proof of delivery somewhere between a driver and a receiving clerk.

One record per load

BridgeHarbor’s central claim is that every load gets a single file, from handshake through to payment. The order, the email thread, the documents, the supplier, the mill and the carrier all attach to that record.

A deal arriving as prose in an email is read by Cora, the platform’s assistant, which extracts the figures, drafts a reply and links the thread to the order. From there the load carries a stage, and the shipment view holds the route, border crossing and document status — including, in the company’s own framing, the document that is missing rather than only the ones that arrived.

Follow-ups attach to loads rather than living in a broker’s memory. A dashboard aggregates active orders, open value and loads in transit.

The assistant drafts, the broker decides

BridgeHarbor draws an explicit boundary around what its assistant may do unattended.

Cora reads, drafts, chases, tracks and flags. She does not send, book or file. Every consequential action stops at a human.

The company presents this as a design decision rather than a current limitation, on the basis that a broker’s counterparties are long-term relationships and software should not be corresponding with them unsupervised.

Email as the integration point

The platform reads deals arriving by email rather than requiring counterparties to adopt a portal or log in. For a trade where suppliers and mills have no incentive to change how they send information, that removes the adoption conversation from the other side of the deal.

The company also argues that general sales software cannot hold what a broker chain requires: three parties deep with a commission split per party, two currencies with an FX rate between them, short tons against metric, and grade, contamination spec, blind or open BOL, release and receiving numbers as primary fields rather than custom ones. Its position is that this is why brokers end up rebuilding the same structure in spreadsheets.

Availability and terms

The founding cohort is capped at thirty desks. Solo is priced at $49 a month, rising to $99 once the first thirty are taken; Crew is $129 a month for up to five seats, rising to $249. The rate is locked for twelve months from the date a desk starts rather than from launch. There is no card required to apply.

The company states plainly that it has no customers yet, does not hold SOC 2 certification and will not imply otherwise. Named next on its build are scale tickets read from a photograph and WhatsApp as an input channel alongside email.

BridgeHarbor describes its intended user as a one-to-ten-person desk brokering recycled paper, plastics or scrap, where the owner is also the operations team, and says explicitly that operators who own a yard are better served elsewhere.

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