Courtesy of KeepTruckin.
- KeepTruckin, a software company that provides fleet management and driver tracking tools, announced it raised $149 million in Series D funding led by GreenOaks Capital. The startup is now valued at $1.25 billion.
- Existing investors IVP, GV, Index Ventures, and Scale Venture Partners also participated in the round.
- In a conversation with Business Insider, KeepTruckin's CEO said the company currently has 55,000 trucking companies and 250,000 individual drivers on its platform.
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The trucking industry has another unicorn. KeepTruckin, a software company that provides fleet management and driver tracking tools, announced Tuesday that it raised $149 million in a Series D round valuing the company at $1.25 billion.
According to cofounder and CEO Shoabin Makani, 50% of trucking companies in the US are using KeepTruckin's driver compliance tools and dash-mounted cameras. He told Business Insider that his company currently has 55,000 trucking companies and 250,000 individual drivers on its platform, up from "essentially zero" in 2016.
"On the investing side, I was looking for companies building technology of the future in freight," said Makani. "We started hanging out at truck stops to understand the problems in the drivers' lives, and that's where the seed was born. By focusing on the drivers and their experience day-to-day, we could build the company we have today."
According to Makani, the trucking industry was a logistical challenge with an outdated business model. He explains that many other companies try to win over carriers and drivers by promising more jobs and increased loads, but often ignore the basic pain points of people doing the work every day.
"We wanted to find an independent reason to build a relationship with the drivers and create something of a universal application," Makani said. "Solving that logging problem was the right entry point for us. We went driver-first not with jobs, but with solving a pain in their lives. When we asked the drivers at truck stops what they hated the most, it was these compliance requirements that forced them to track their hours on sheets on paper. It was tedious, and it was clear we could solve it in a unique way."
Makani explained to Business Insider that the new funds, led by GreenOaks Capital with participation from existing investors IVP and GV, allow KeepTruckin to "double down" on safety and efficiency products in addition to investing heavily in artificial intelligence and machine learning for things like predictive alerts. He says that the team is working on dual-facing dash camera in addition to building a tool that helps match carriers with loads.
"I believe that the core opportunity is so great that this provides the opportunity for KeepTruckin to be one of the fastest growing companies in the space," said Neil Mehta, Managing Partner at Greenoaks Capital. "There are two components of growth that excite me in particular. We are especially excited about what Shoaib and the team have planned over the long-term, including Facility Insights, asset tracking and a remarkable Smart Load Board."
According to Makani, fleet management will be even more important in a world with autonomous trucks. Fully autonomous trucks are still a ways off, and current trucks will still have to live out their life cycles before carriers will sink money into new vehicles.
"No matter if it's a truck that drives itself or with a human driver, trucks still need to get filled," Makani said. "We think of [KeepTruckin] as a connected management platform with visibility into cargo and trucks, and that need doesn't go away. If anything it increases. Fleet management will always be an opportunity and a problem for us to solve."
