Moving What Matters: The Story of Yosh Rozen and PartRunner
As a student at Northeastern, Yosh Rozen rented a U-Haul and made the deliveries himself, hauling boilers and PVC pipe around Boston. Years later, he made a decision most founders dread: selling the business in the country where his company was born. Today, PartRunner moves freight across Mexico for some of the largest retailers and e-commerce companies in the world.
Yosh is Co-Founder and CEO of PartRunner, an AI-powered trucking marketplace with embedded financing that connects enterprise shippers with owner-operators and small fleets for local and long-haul routes across the first, middle and last mile. Getting here took almost a decade, two countries and a near-total reinvention of the business. Through all of it, Yosh has held onto a belief he set for himself at 18: failure is a stepping stone to success.
Two Cultures, One Restless Mind
Yosh (short for Yoshua) grew up between two cultures. His father is Mexican and his mother is American, and both are Jewish. He was born in El Paso, Texas, and raised in Mexico City, the middle of three kids.
He was the creative one, a painter who took IB Art, and choosing a college major gave him real anxiety. “I was very against the idea of somebody deciding their future at 18,” he says. “I never wanted to be pigeonholed.”
So before college, he took a gap year to read philosophy and wrestle with the big questions. “I think I was 18 when I told myself, we need to see failure as a stepping stone to our successes,” he says.
At Northeastern University in Boston, one summer internship was enough to steer him out of civil engineering and into industrial engineering, which he calls the most “business-y” discipline because at its core it’s about process improvement. Along the way, he was named to El Mundo Boston’s 30 Under 30. “I never liked the status quo,” he says. “I liked being different, I liked thinking different, I liked not being complacent.”
A Two-Year Bet
For his third co-op, Yosh joined a new Sherman Center program that paid engineering students to build their own businesses. He applied with one idea, got in, and promptly swapped it for another: DeliverPart, an on-demand delivery service for plumbing and HVAC suppliers. The pitch was simple: “If you can move pizza within 30 minutes, why can’t you move PVC pipe and boilers within 30 minutes?” The company was later renamed PartRunner, after the people in the trades whose job is, quite literally, running for parts.
A month before graduating in May 2018, Yosh sat with his parents at Mozart’s Coffee Roasters in Austin and told them he would give PartRunner two years (though he admits he may have said one). “Typical Latino-Jewish parents, they were like, are you sure?” he laughs. A scholarship that covered much of his education made the bet easier to take.
He launched with two co-founders he met in school, Tarun Aleti on technology and Dan Legmann on operations, while he led sales. After MassChallenge and Northeastern’s IDEA accelerator, they bootstrapped on almost no salary before raising from angels. The business grew to about $50,000 a month in gross revenue, but Yosh knew early funding didn’t mean they had cracked it.
The Hardest Pivot
Cemex Ventures, the venture arm of building materials giant Cemex, led PartRunner’s seed round with one condition: they wanted PartRunner in Mexico. “If you think about it, it was absolutely crazy,” Yosh says. “We were a pre-seed, seed-stage company. I would not say that we had product-market fit.”
They went anyway. PartRunner opened in Mexico in 2022 with a country manager and a small local team, while Yosh flew back and forth “like a madman.” In Mexico, PartRunner became industry agnostic, moving freight for Amazon, Mercado Libre, Walmart and Elektra, mostly on dedicated routes, with no winter slump and about a quarter of the operating cost. By early 2023, it was showing the product-market fit the US never had.
The US business peaked at about $300,000 a month, but every sale was a grind against better-funded competitors and long Northeast winters. Most of all, every customer needed convincing. “You can’t be in the teaching business,” Yosh says. “Either there’s a click or there’s not.”
Yosh has always refused to let a company drift into what he calls a “zombie state,” alive but not really growing. So in mid-2023, PartRunner decided to sell its US business to a Texas company expanding into the Northeast. Dan stepped away when the deal closed at the end of 2024, and the company has been all in on Mexico ever since.
To most founders, walking away from the market where you started would feel like failure. For Yosh, it was the stepping stone he had promised himself at 18. Had PartRunner stayed in the US alone, he believes it likely would have closed or merged by 2023. Instead, it found the market it was built for.
Service First, Technology Second
Having watched plenty of marketplaces fail, Yosh has come away with two truths about the model.
The first is that a marketplace is a service business before it’s a tech business. “You’re going to have the best technology and the best AI and the best AI agents,” he says. “But if you don’t provide the service, and you remove the humanity behind it, things go wrong.”
At PartRunner, that service starts with the people behind the wheel. The small fleet owners and drivers who move the freight are, in Yosh’s view, the company’s most important allies. His shorthand for it is “happy fleet, happy customer.” Going into 2027, the goal is for PartRunner to be known as the company that works best with fleets across Mexico.
The second truth is that a marketplace is a financial business, too. There’s always a gap between when you pay drivers and when customers pay you, and without the infrastructure to carry it, things unravel fast. He points to Convoy, the freight unicorn that collapsed almost overnight in 2023. That’s why embedded financing sits at the heart of PartRunner. Through Quick Pay, fleets can choose to get paid faster instead of waiting on standard terms, and it has become one of the company’s strongest tools for keeping them loyal.
None of that makes him less bullish on AI. In 2026, PartRunner moved its entire operation onto Nexus 2.0, an AI-native platform built in-house under Tarun’s lead, with AI agents that onboard fleets and support drivers over WhatsApp, work once done by hand. Still, Yosh doesn’t think AI should replace the part that matters most. “What makes you human? The trust factor in humanity,” he says. “We should never forget that.”
Same Problems, Bigger Tickets
Yosh likes to say companies fail for one of three reasons: the team, the cash, or building something nobody wants. The team was never PartRunner’s problem, and the US taught him plenty about the third. Cash was the hard part. More than once early on, he lived the classic “two months until payroll” moment and made deep cuts to buy time. “I never personally enjoyed firing people, but you need to learn how to do it,” he says.
What keeps it in perspective is advice from a founder on his fourth company, who told him that after selling multiple companies, the only thing that had changed was the size of the problems that reached him. Early on, he worried about $100 problems. Now, anything under $25,000 was someone else’s to handle. For Yosh, that’s the CEO’s job in one sentence: you solve problems, and the ticket size keeps growing.
Where PartRunner Is Today
Today, PartRunner averages about $1 million a month in gross revenue, up 42% year over year, and completes more than 6,500 routes a month through a network of roughly 5,000 certified fleets in about 50 cities across Mexico.
The Engage program is helping open the next chapter: large US corporations with operations in Mexico. Yosh values the preparation behind each conversation and the goal of getting to a “text message basis” with the people inside these companies. Above all, he values the access. Engage has opened doors that would be extremely hard to open otherwise, and two of those conversations, with Home Depot and UPS, have already become active pilots.
PartRunner is backed by lead investor Golden Section, along with BDev Ventures, LockerOne Ventures and Engage.
Yosh’s Founder Equation
Yosh believes PartRunner is in the right place at the right time to become one of the most impactful logistics tech companies in Latin America. “I can see the growth, I can see the potential, I can see where this is heading,” he says.
His definition of success has broadened, though. An exit still matters, not just for him but for everyone who has given their time to PartRunner, because every one of those hours could have been spent somewhere else. What has changed is how much he values the small wins along the way. “What’s the point of being an unhappy person and just enjoying the end product?” he asks. “Then what’s the point of anything?”
Happiness on its own isn’t enough, either. If you’re happy but the people closest to you are miserable, that isn’t success. For Yosh, who now lives in Chicago and splits his time with Mexico City, that circle is his wife, his family and the team building PartRunner alongside him. The last piece is freedom, the independence to build on his own terms. So when asked for his equation for success, Yosh puts it this way:
Happiness Within + Happiness Around + Freedom
For someone who once drove the U-Haul himself, the problems have gotten a lot bigger. That, he would say, is exactly the point.
Recent Comments