Today, KeepTruckin announced it secured $50 million in Series C financing—bringing the company’s total funding to $78 million. The latest round values the company at $500 million dollars according to the Wall Street Journal. With this funding, KeepTruckin plans to invest in product development, expand sales and support teams, and enter new markets. IVP led the round with participation from existing investors Scale Venture Partners, Index Ventures and Google Ventures. IVP General Partner Sandy Miller will join the KeepTruckin Board of Directors and IVP Principal Roseanne Wincek will join as Board Observer, effective immediately.
In the past 12 months KeepTruckin has grown at a record clip. In addition to growing annual recurring revenue 80x, the company expanded its team from 70 to 500 members over its six global offices and grew its customer base from 500 to over 30,000 companies.
“To our knowledge, we’re one of the fastest growing SaaS companies ever,” said Shoaib Makani, cofounder and CEO of KeepTruckin in a press release. “More importantly, we are building the largest network of connected trucks in the world and fundamentally improving the safety and efficiency of the trucking industry. With this new investment, our network will grow to 400,000 trucks by the end of 2018.”
If KeepTruckin were to hit the 400,000 mark by the end of 2018, the company could be valued over $1 billion dollars, based on FreightWaves’ estimates. Using multiples of installed units of $2500/subscriber, 400,000 units would put the company into Unicorn status. While trucking has a number of venture-backed tech startups valued in the hundreds of millions- namely, Macropoint, Fourkites, Convoy, and Transfix, no company in the trucking startup space has become a Unicorn.
Launched in 2013, KeepTruckin’s electronic logging and fleet management solution connects vehicles, drivers, and fleet managers on a single platform. The company provides a modern electronic logging device (ELD) and software that handles compliance, safety, GPS tracking, fuel tax reporting and much more.
Based on reports and discussions with folks familiar with KeepTruckin’s plans, the company is believed to be exploring load matching services as part of its offering. If it were to venture in this direction, it would be hitting competition from companies like DAT, Truckstop, BigRoad, Convoy, Uber, and Transfix. Omnitracs, the undisputed leader in enterprise ELD services is also exploring opportunities to match capacity and shippers on a single platform. The new CEO of Omnitracs commented on plans at their user conference in February. Ray Greer described load matching as the “holy-grail of trucking.”
Lead investor IVP has a strong track record of backing industry-leading fleet management software companies like Fleetmatics and @Road. Fleetmatics had a highly successful IPO and was later acquired by Verizon for $2.4B in 2016. @Road was acquired by Trimble in 2007 for $496M.
“KeepTruckin has harnessed the power of the smartphone to build a driver-first electronic logs and fleet management tool,” said Sandy Miller, general partner of IVP. “It is one of the fastest growing software companies we’ve ever seen, which is a testament to Shoaib’s, Obaid’s, and Ryan’s vision, deep understanding of a market and customer empathy, and building to scale.”
This announcement comes just before the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration begins enforcing the ELD mandate on April 1, 2018. The mandate requires all truck drivers who maintain a driving log to use a compliant ELD to record their hours of service.
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