TruckSmarter raises $16M and launches Dispatch to fix fragmented load sourcing for truck drivers

thanks so much for having me on, guys. Yeah. Have a great rest of your day. Talk to you soon. Cheers. Bye. Thanks. Bye. Up next, we have Dan from Truck Smarter. Restream waiting room. It's time to People were saying, "Are we going to truck dumber? " No, we're going to truck smarter.

And we will welcome Dan out of the rear. Founder mode. He's in founder mode. Dan, how you doing? What's going on? Good to see you. Good. What's going on, guys? Good to see you. Too much. We're trucking. We're locked in. The great lockin has begun. Uh many financings have been announced.

We hear you have some news to share with us. Why don't you introduce yourself, the company, and then the news? Yeah, it's been an absolutely packed day for fundraising. So, I appreciate you guys uh getting us in. I'm happy to bring the party to freight. My name is Dan, co-founder, CEO of Truck Smarter.

Uh we're super excited to announce our fundraising and the launch uh of our AI product dispatch as well. What was the fund raise? Give me the details. What happened?

Yeah, so we we we we just raised from Socium Ventures, which is backed by Cox Enterprises, and then uh backed by all of our familiar friends, Founders Fund, Thrive Capital, A6Z, BCV to continue building the absolute best tools for chunky companies. And how much did you raise? 16 million. Congratulations. There we go.

Fantastic. There we go. Warm up on that one. Give us uh give us a quick history of the company. When did you when did you start trucking smarter? So, we started in 2021. Uh we first started by building a load group.

So for folks for for folks that are not familiar, a lot of trucking companies today, so there's what almost a million truck drivers out there, 95% of them, 95% of these trucking companies own less than five trucks. And the way they find jobs is very similar to you going on Craigslist to buy something. Yep. Right.

So all this information is everywhere. The information is not entirely verified. The people are not even verified. You're kind of just scraping the barrel constantly spending hours every single day. So that's kind of been the very core of our company.

We started by building a load board that helped them find those jobs uh in a more efficient way. And then we started layering on a ton of financial services, getting them paid, getting them access to credit. If you think about these are the small businesses that just do not get access to a lot of these things.

And uh because we're at the very beginning of their revenue journey, we can just see all this information.

Uh and then obviously now with AI uh this year we we we there's just an tremendous opportunity to just make finding a job so much more efficient and that's kind of what we've been heads down on for the last 6 months. There's a poster behind you. Load boards should be free.

Explain to us uh how exactly does the industry work? You have to pay to find a trucking job. How does that work? It is it is absolutely crazy, right? So, if you think about it, uh, for you to for you to access this Craigslist type of thing, you got to probably pay anywhere from 50 bucks to 250, 300 bucks a month.

At the very beginning of our company, we made it extremely clear. So, we can't really go back from here. We said load boards should be free.

We built software that kind of connected all the disperate pieces of information into a single place, gave it all away for free, and that's kind of the engine for our entire business. We continue to grow tremendously uh from that. Uh, and that's where we continue to layer on all these different services.

What's the what's the kind of competitive dynamic in the market? Like, are you going to force everyone to go free? It seems really obvious to like if there's a barrier to getting a customer, drop that to zero and then figure out how to monetize the customer somewhere else.

I'm surprised no one's done this before, so congrats on the innovation. But it seems like the competitive dynamic will be like people will try and fast follow you. So, uh, is it just a race to build more financial products, better products behind the scenes?

like what what's the what's the long term or is it just like you got to get big you got to get all the data on there you got to get big right so I think for us right it's a it's a race to layer on additional services a lot of the existing companies there's a lot of big load boards out there they've been around for 50 60 years right so you think about Craigslist right a lot of people have tried to verticalize all the various categories of Craigslist they've done so in a very real way but Craigslist is still a monster they still do hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue so there's still a lot of this pattern with a lot of the existing companies But for us, we're just able to layer on all these other things that just makes our platform continue to be more attractive.

Have you done What the Truck podcast? This is a funny Have you done it? Yes. Yes. Yeah, I've done this podcast randomly. They they were talking about nicotine pouches and the guy wanted to have me on. It was really fun. Uh it's actually a extremely well-run show.

Um but but uh in that vein, like I imagine you can't go on every week, you got to reach truckers. uh what's working on the growth side? Yeah. Yeah. So I think for us, right, we're the number one load board on the platform on the market today, right?

You search load board, you search free loadboard, we're number one or number two. That's the strategy, right? Making it free just makes it incredibly easy for anybody to access. Sure. And as a result, you're getting all the people that are coming into the market, right? So SEO play.

Uh are you doing any like brand building high top offunnel uh you know awareness with truckers? Are there specific like campaigns? so hard because they like the truckers aren't in all one place by definition, right? They're all over the country. So, it's not like you can buy one billboard and you're good.

Uh, you know, h how do you reach people and actually create like brand awareness? Yeah, I think for us it's kind of continuing to solve that number one acute pain point, right, which is finding a job. Uh, and that's kind of what we've been focused on from day one.

And as a result, I think we just have one of the best growth engines that can reach these trucking companies because almost certainly every trucking company has probably downloaded a load board and there's a very high chance that it's ours.

Uh and then as a result, we kind of have that information to just continue to offer them more services. Yep. Uh fantastic. Congratulations. This is fantastic. We will uh we'll talk to you soon. We'll let you get back to your day. Have a great day. Loadboard should be free. Appreciate it, guys. Thanks.

Thanks for Well, On that note, we have Yeah, it is past uh Oh, it's 2:20. Well, we all keep doing these three and a half hour streams. We keep saying we're going to do two and a half. Uh we always addicted. Tyler, any other breaking news? Tearing up the timeline. Anything you got for me? Uh no, no crazy news.

No crazy news. I don't know. Okay, that's good. Well, we will see you tomorrow. Uh we will be live from White Common Demo Day. Tune in. We're going to have a lot of fun there. And then in on Wednesday, we'll be in New York City. So, we are going on a little bit of a world tour, a little bit of a American tour.

That's right. This week and we will see you tomorrow.