TruckSmarter drawing investors at 25$ million in Series B funding round
Digital trucking platform TruckSmarter announced it has closed a $25 million Series B funding round to continue building on its dedicated platform for owner-operator functions.
Since 2021, the company has raised $44 million from many investors in the latest round and other industry angel investors including Ryan Petersen (Flexport), Tony Xu (DoorDash), Eric Glyman (Ramp), and Jett McCandless and Jason Duboe (project44).
What attracted these investors and industry tycoons is the “straightforward, driver-centric approach the co-founders, chief executive Daniel Kao and chief technology officer Paolo Bernasconi, have chosen to build out their FreightTech solution,’’ the company said.
“Since the beginning, we have put the needs of the truck driver first. Not just from a large carrier perspective but through the eyes of the owner-operator — the entrepreneur,” Kao said. “So let’s go and meet the driver where they are and build a platform for them. As a result, we have continued to scale without carrying acquisition costs and by building the business organically.”
Free Load Board
To meet these small-carrier needs, the digital platform provides users with access to the company’s free load board with loads from vetted sources and factoring services with 1.5-percent non-recourse, month-to-month terms, from which TruckSmarter pulls its revenue, the company said.
With its new capital, TruckSmarter looks to soon add more finance and banking tools to its “driver ecosystem,” Kao said.
“This has been an opportunistic round for us. We haven’t even spent our seed money when we raised this round and we continue to see quite a bit of growth through our platform,” Kao said. “Our goal now is to stay laser-focused on the key problems that our truck drivers see every single day and build the right solutions for them within our ecosystem.”
Scaling Users
When it comes to scaling the number of users, Kao said word-of-mouth will continue to accelerate TruckSmarter’s user count.
“Let’s have drivers talk to us organically because we feel a lot of drivers get their information through trusted drivers in their community — a community we are excited to now be a part of,” Kao said.
The investors share the owner-operators’ excitement about having TruckSmarter in their communities, according to company officials.
“TruckSmarter is on track to serve over 100,000 truckers in the U.S. this year, evidence of the company’s powerful value proposition,” said Matias Van Thienen, partner at Founders Fund. “Their truck-first mentality is the right approach to win the highly fragmented road freight industry.”