About Bench Energy

Our Story

Bench Energy was founded by commodity traders who were tired of losing money to email-based freight tendering chaos. We watched teams spend days coordinating tenders across email chains, dealing with information leakage between brokers, and losing thousands in demurrage costs due to procurement delays.

In 2022, we built FreightTender to solve this problem: a closed, auditable platform where commodity and chemical traders can run competitive freight tenders without the chaos of email.

Since launch, we've processed 2,000+ tenders worth $1.2B in freight value. Our customers report:

• •30–50% reduction in demurrage costs
• •60% reduction in procurement time
• •$150K–500K annual savings per customer
• •100% compliance audit trail

Our Mission

We help commodity and chemical trading companies reduce freight costs and procurement risk through closed, auditable tenders and daily market intelligence. We believe that better information and better processes lead to better decisions—and better margins.

What We Do

• FreightTender — Closed freight tender platform for commodity traders. Invite brokers, run competitive tenders in a private environment where brokers can't see each other's offers, get structured offers, and maintain a complete audit trail for compliance.
• Coal Market News & Analysis — Daily briefs, expert analysis, and market data for traders and procurement teams. Stay ahead of market movements with real-time intelligence.
• Trader Education — Anki flashcard decks covering coal, metals, and oil trading terminology. For analysts and junior traders building market fluency. Browse decks →

Leadership

We're a team of commodity traders, software engineers, and market analysts who understand freight and trading inside and out.

• Alex V. — Co-founder & CEO. 15+ years in commodity trading and freight procurement (bulk dry, Asia–Europe corridors).
• Jordan K. — Co-founder & CTO. 12+ years building trading, risk, and logistics systems for commodity desks.

Bench Energy was built by operators who ran tenders over email — FreightTender is the product we wished we had on the desk.

Why We Built This

Email-based freight tendering is broken:

• •Brokers see each other's offers (information leakage)
• •No structured data (manual entry errors)
• •No audit trail (compliance nightmare)
• •Days lost to coordination (demurrage costs spike)

We built FreightTender to fix all of this. Now our customers run tenders in hours instead of days, with full visibility and zero information leakage.

Our Customers

We work with commodity trading companies, chemical trading desks, and procurement teams at companies managing millions in annual freight spend. Our customers range from small independent traders to large multinational commodity houses.