C
Connie Loizos
Guest
Jin Stedge studied aerospace engineering at MIT, but after she found herself at Scotty Labs, an SRI International spin-out focused on autonomous driving, she says she came to appreciate how far away the tech is from large-scale adoption.
Indeed, when Scotty was acquired by DoorDash in the summer of 2019, she teamed up with Sanjaya Wijeratnebut, a colleague and senior software engineer at Scotty Labs, and they got to work on an issue that was closer to her heart anyway: empowering truck drivers.
Stedge’s grandparents were owner operators who acquired up to six trucks in the 1980s; her uncles and cousins also entered the business, she says. Armed with their insights, not only did she know the daily difficulties that independent truckers endure but she knew that predictions by AI experts who said truck drivers would be out of work by 2027 were flat wrong. “If you think about what long-haul truckers do,” says Stedge, “they go over the Rockies, they have to tarp freight to the back of their trucks, they’re often without cell service for hours at a time — that kind of environment is just really hard to automate.”
Stedge also knew the market she’d be chasing was enormous — even while a lot of startups were already flocking to address different aspects of the trucking industry, from brokers and load marketplaces to outfits that help with cash flow; from equipment makers to accountants to insurance providers and compliance products.
In fact, the opportunity that Stedge and Wijeratnebut spied with their startup, TrueNorth, was to create a single platform that does it all. The idea was to help truckers manage their customers; find, book, and coordinate loads; optimize their routes; invoice their customers; and collect payment. It would also pay them upon the completion of a job, so drivers wouldn’t be forced to wait a month or more to be paid, as has long been customary.
The idea, broadly speaking, was for TrueNorth to give the independent truckers who make up somewhere between 10% and 20% of the industry the resources of a larger fleet — and better economics.
Y Combinator liked the pitch enough to welcome Stedge and Wijeratnebut into its winter 2020 batch. A seed check from Sam Altman quickly followed, then an 50 million in Series B funding co-led Groom and Altman (along with brothers Max and Jack). Many others have joined the ride, too, including Flexport Fund, Tribe Capital, Original Capital, K5 Global, 137 Ventures, and Fifth Down Capital.
TrueNorth has so far raised
The question now is whether TrueNorth, which already employs 50 people — half of them women, notably — can deliver on its promises.
Certainly, the \)">50 million should help, along with Indeed, when Scotty was acquired by DoorDash in the summer of 2019, she teamed up with Sanjaya Wijeratnebut, a colleague and senior software engineer at Scotty Labs, and they got to work on an issue that was closer to her heart anyway: empowering truck drivers.
Stedge’s grandparents were owner operators who acquired up to six trucks in the 1980s; her uncles and cousins also entered the business, she says. Armed with their insights, not only did she know the daily difficulties that independent truckers endure but she knew that predictions by AI experts who said truck drivers would be out of work by 2027 were flat wrong. “If you think about what long-haul truckers do,” says Stedge, “they go over the Rockies, they have to tarp freight to the back of their trucks, they’re often without cell service for hours at a time — that kind of environment is just really hard to automate.”
Stedge also knew the market she’d be chasing was enormous — even while a lot of startups were already flocking to address different aspects of the trucking industry, from brokers and load marketplaces to outfits that help with cash flow; from equipment makers to accountants to insurance providers and compliance products.
In fact, the opportunity that Stedge and Wijeratnebut spied with their startup, TrueNorth, was to create a single platform that does it all. The idea was to help truckers manage their customers; find, book, and coordinate loads; optimize their routes; invoice their customers; and collect payment. It would also pay them upon the completion of a job, so drivers wouldn’t be forced to wait a month or more to be paid, as has long been customary.
The idea, broadly speaking, was for TrueNorth to give the independent truckers who make up somewhere between 10% and 20% of the industry the resources of a larger fleet — and better economics.
Y Combinator liked the pitch enough to welcome Stedge and Wijeratnebut into its winter 2020 batch. A seed check from Sam Altman quickly followed, then an
TrueNorth has so far raised
TrueNorth says, too, that it increases drivers’ revenue by helping them find the highest-paying trucking jobs and making it simple to book them.
Still, one outstanding question is how effectively TrueNorth is able to reach its customers, given that it is targeting a very fragmented market. Stedge notes that the company has “never done outbound sales” because all of its customers have found the company on their own, and she says that 90% have additionally referred friends.With deeper pocketed rivals, it could need to spin up a more aggressive marketing strategy.
Those deeper pocket rivals could prove problematic, too. Interestingly, TrueNorth’s most direct competitor may be CloudTrucks, which just two weeks ago closed on
Arodiogbu’s vision is also to help trucking entrepreneurs operate their businesses. As he told TechCrunch in late November, “Lots of tools are being built for brokers and shippers, but not nearly enough is being done for the truck driver who’s actually doing the really hard work.”
For her part, Stedge sees such momentum as a strong signal to truckers and investors alike. “We serve the same customer, which is independent truckers, [but] I think it’s good, to be honest,” she says. “It’s a humongous market. It’s a
More important to her, Stedge says: the company has been significantly improving its contribution margin, which is basically the portion of sales that helps to offset its fixed costs. “It doesn’t matter if you’re growing really fast if there’s a leaky bucket,” says Stedge, who could just as well be talking about one of her trucking customers.
“You want to know that you’re building a business that lasts, and we have been very efficient with our money.”