Mercury CEO Named 2026 Supply Chain Rising Star

Inside Mercury’s Approach to Simplifying Healthcare Shipping

Shipping seems easy … until you experience that moment of complexity and it isn’t anymore.

Healthcare and life sciences materials are complex and high-stakes. At Mercury, we take our role in delivering these materials seriously. Our mission is simple: to make shipping easier for the people responsible for moving critical materials.

Mercury’s mission and CEO, Josh Medow, recently earned the title of Rising Star in the 2026 Pros to Know Awards by Supply & Demand Chain Executive, an annual program honoring leaders who are transforming supply chain operations and delivering measurable impact across their industries.

We spoke with Josh about the philosophy behind Mercury’s operating model and how we plan to continue simplifying complex healthcare and life sciences shipments for our customers.

What does your day-to-day role as CEO look like?

Despite the title, my day usually looks less like a traditional CEO and more like a mix of product manager, copywriter, and customer experience lead.

I spend a large portion of my time inside Mercury’s platform working with our engineers and designers. We review live screens, watch user recordings, and ask a simple question: Will a customer understand what to do when they’re under time pressure, and the shipment can’t be replaced?

We track where users hesitate in the portal, which fields create confusion, and how we can remove friction from the booking process. Sometimes that means adjusting workflows. Sometimes it’s rewriting interface text so the right decision becomes obvious.

At the same time, I review every inbound lead that comes to Mercury and frequently track live shipments to understand how customers experience our service from pickup to delivery.

Why is customer experience so central to Mercury’s model?

Healthcare shipping is different. When shipments contain research materials, clinical trial samples, or temperature-sensitive therapies, delays aren’t just inconvenient - they can affect patient care or progress.

Because of that, we’ve intentionally designed Mercury to stay close to the work. We’ve removed layers of overhead so our team can focus on solving real problems for customers.

One example of this approach is our twice-weekly Shipping War Rooms. Our team reviews shipments from the week and categorizes issues in two ways:

• Band-Aids: What operations can change immediately so the next shipment improves

• Stitches: Long-term fixes in software, workflows, or training so the problem doesn’t happen again

This “Band-Aids and Stitches” framework has become Mercury’s operating system for continuous improvement.

How has Mercury improved the shipping process through technology?

One of our biggest projects was rebuilding Mercury’s technology platform from the ground up.

When I acquired the company, shipments ran through an extremely simple system. While it worked for basic logistics, it couldn’t capture the information needed for highly regulated life sciences shipments. That mismatch created avoidable delays and unnecessary risk.

Since launching Mercury’s new proprietary platform in 2023, we’ve seen significant improvements:

• 65% of shipments are now booked directly through the platform

• 100% of shipments are managed within it

• Automated validations and structured workflows have reduced delays by 40%

For customers shipping regulated biological materials, this means clearer workflows, fewer errors, and a system designed specifically for healthcare and life sciences shipments.

How has Mercury simplified cold-chain shipping?

Cold-chain shipping can overwhelm customers with hundreds of packaging options, temperature ranges, and validation requirements.

To simplify the process, we evaluated the performance of every packaging type our customers were using and mapped them to real-world use cases. From there, we created a standardized catalog with small, medium, and large options for each temperature range, along with validated durations for domestic and international shipments.

The result has been a 99.6% success rate in international cold-chain shipping, fewer packaging errors, and faster decisions for customers operating under time pressure.

How has Mercury reduced friction for new customers?

We noticed that companies with urgent, one-time shipments often abandoned the process because traditional onboarding can take too long.

To address this, we introduced Guest Shipping, which allows customers to book a one-off shipment quickly without going through a full onboarding process.

This approach helps companies move urgent materials immediately while also allowing them to experience Mercury’s service. Many of these one-time shipments naturally turn into long-term partnerships once customers see how the process works.

What’s next for Mercury?

Growth is important, but not if it creates distance between us and our customers.

Our focus is expanding Mercury’s sales-and-operations squad model, pairing dedicated teams with customers so there are no handoff failures between sales and service. At the same time, we’re continuing to expand the Mercury platform so customers can oversee complex shipments clearly and confidently in one system.

Ultimately, our goal hasn’t changed: simplify healthcare and life sciences shipping while working closely to the people who rely on it. For our customers, that means clearer systems, fewer delays, and a team that understands the stakes behind every shipment.