Geoffrey, thanks for sharing your story with us. OR sure is a weird niche. Good enough algorithms for solving these problems have existed for decades1, but we still see low adoption and your 95% estimate of the companies not optimizing their operations rings true. Similarly to you, I spent a short while trying to sell VRP optimization with an API business model, and what dawned on me was that most companies do not ha…
If nobody does something in a whole industry perhaps it's because it's not a differentiating factor. Do you have a link to the Swedish company? It just sounds like typical "software engineers know better" story where they go bankrupt after a few years because turns out the important bits are in other parts of the business.
Still, it _is_ a good story, and plausible based on what I saw to be the state of the industry back then. Your run of the mill last-mile courier services were really badly organized, from the mathematics and optimization side as simple as they get, and ability to build a robust optimization transportation management system would've given serious competitive edge.
(edit: removed repeated words)