Axle aims to empower trucking companies using big data

While digital highways are connecting more and more of the global supply chain — including linking every tractor-trailer in the U.S. to the internet — the founders of Axle said most trucking companies and logistics operators are still missing out on a wealth of data.

“We noticed that transportation and trucking companies, everyone from carriers, broker, shippers, they just weren’t getting the full value of technology that was available,” Dhruv Gupta, co-founder and CEO of Axle, told FreightWaves.

Gupta co-founded Axle in 2022 with Jinyan Zang, who serves as the company’s COO. Axle is a universal application programming interface for the trucking industry, with goals that include improving supply chain resilience, reducing fuel costs and ultimately making trucking a well-paid and sustainable career.

Last year, Gupta and Zang generated $2.6 million in a first-round fundraise that included One Way Ventures, NewBuild VC, Supply Chain Ventures, Agya Ventures, Ford Street Ventures, SNR, Helene Ventures, MAGIC Fund and Phoenix Fund, as well as the founders of Tive (Krenar Komoni) and Swoop (Sameer Bhalla).

Gupta and Zang met at Harvard several years ago and bonded over shared interests in data science, logistics, transportation and micromobility.

“Axle really came about because of both of our shared interests and the stars aligning and it was time to kick off a company together to build something for truckers,” Zang said. “It was taking all that expertise that we have when it comes to technology and this industry, which has seen an explosion of new companies, and the need for data to power all these new services.”

According to the American Trucking Associations, there were 13.86 million single-unit (two-axle, six-tire or more) trucks registered in the U.S. in 2021, representing 5% of all motor vehicles registered.

There are currently more than 750,000 active U.S. motor carriers that own or lease at least one tractor. The trucking industry accounted for over 67% of North American freight movements in June alone, totaling almost $90 billion, according to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics.

Axle’s universal data platform gathers intelligence from various sources — such as electronic logging devices and transportation management systems — into a framework that allows tech companies to offer more solutions to freight transporters and logistics companies.

“The primary data source we’re starting off with is ELD data. That gets into both the telematics information from the vehicle as well as the corresponding information, such as the driver and the hours of service of that driver,” Zang said. “TMS data is another example of this. Where there’s a lot of different TMSs out there that people use for different reasons, at the same time, if you’re in logistics and trucking, you have to talk to other companies. We want to make sure to make the data sharing as easy as possible.”

While fleets are required to install ELDs in all their vehicles to ensure driving hours are accurately tracked, the devices can also be used to gather valuable information.

“For trucking companies, they spend a lot of time on routing optimization, fuel cards, fraud, spending a lot of human time on things like compliance and different workflows,” Gupta said. “At the same time, we’ve seen this explosion of firms that are trying to serve trucking companies to solve all of these problems.”

Gupta said many FreightTech firms that aim to help trucking companies improve their bottom line don’t have the right data.

“The main thing that we saw was that all of these software companies, they were trying to solve these core problems that trucking companies and truckers needed, but they didn’t have any of the core data that was required to enable real-time visibility, trying to figure out where the vehicles and drivers actually are, how are they driving, can they drive further?” Gupta said. “That became this core bottleneck with a deep data problem for these companies that we wanted to solve.”

Axle’s customers include companies such as AtoB, FleetOps and LogRock.

“We have some companies that are data sources to us, like Samsara and Geotab,” Gupta said. “These are the devices that keep track of where the actual vehicles and drivers are. They flow data up to us so that our customers, which are logistics and tech software companies, can use our data and then serve their customers, their customers being trucking companies.”