FedEx’s same-day delivery offering took years to build

In a marketplace where speed is everything, the conversation “lumbered on” for eight years, Bill Catania, CEO of OneRail, told Retail Brew.

The last-mile delivery network and logistics platform, founded in 2018, had been pitching FedEx on the idea of partnering so the carrier service could offer same-day delivery to its 2.3 million active customers. But it wasn’t until 2025 that FedEx got serious about same-day delivery, Catania said, and that’s when things “accelerated dramatically.”

Now that vision is a reality with the launch of FedEx SameDay. Through its partnership with OneRail, FedEx is connected to a national network of 1,000 delivery partners providing two-hour and end-of-day service as well as real-time tracking, proof of delivery, and predictive ETAs to customers.

“The OneRail team offers a great opportunity to—I don’t want to say flip a switch—but effectively unlock that capability nationwide,” Jason Brenner, SVP of digital portfolio at FedEx, told Retail Brew. “This is a good opportunity for us to go to market quickly.”

So why did FedEx wait until now to roll out same-day delivery, when companies such as Amazon have been offering it for more than a decade? For OneRail, which is ultimately enabling that ability, the answer comes down to how hard it is to build a reliable nationwide network that a company like FedEx could trust to meet its standards.

“Every overnight success takes a decade,” Catania said.

The challenge of scaling: That process entailed assembling a pool of 1,000 delivery providers and 12 million drivers, then connecting them with retailers in real time and serving as a bridge between supply and demand in a decentralized marketplace.

Given the difficulty of building this kind of network piecemeal, OneRail made the decision early on to be an aggregator. “We’re able to connect supply and demand in a way that provides dependability, because we’re not relying on one carrier,” Catania said. “We’re like a mutual fund for carriers.”

As this aggregation of third-party carriers expanded its footprint over the last eight years, OneRail eventually became a viable option for retailers such as Lowe’s, Tractor Supply, PepsiCo, and Signet Jewelers—partnerships that in turn helped the company reach the kind of “critical mass” that would make it appealing to FedEx, Catania said.

“Certainly FedEx could go build this themselves,” he said. “They have plenty of capital. They have brilliant people. But how long do you want to take to build it? Or do you want to go to market now with a scaled solution?”

The right price: Brenner said there is a possibility that in the long term, FedEx could develop the capacity to offer same-day delivery internally, but acknowledged that “all of this takes a lot of time and energy to build out.”

“We’re solving for a number of things all at once here,” he said. “Obviously the cost to our customers has to be competitive, and competitive cost in this space requires extremely high density.”

Indeed, getting the unit economics right has been key to OneRail’s success. Some of that came with scale, Catania said, but technology and AI in particular were essential to lowering costs. Without its AI-powered dispatching service, he said, the company would need 5,000 employees sitting in a building every day routing deliveries. Instead it processes 60–100 deliveries a second and 300,000 deliveries a day automatically using historical data and machine learning. 

“That’s where the cost-saving starts,” Catania said.