CloudTrucks, a platform helping truck drivers find work and organize their business has announced a fund raise of $20.5 million in a bid to help drivers make better decisions on which loads to take to increase their revenue.
The funds were raised through Series A round led by Caffeinated Capital with participation from Craft Ventures, Khosla Ventures, SciFi VC, Kindred Ventures, Abstract Ventures, and Better Tomorrow Ventures.
Co-founder and CEO Tobenna Arodiogbu said that the problem they were trying to solve was basically helping truck drivers manage their business better.
“We noticed that more and more drivers wanted to take control of their schedule and become entrepreneurs and needed a lot more help with managing everything: from revenue, cash flow as well as minimizing their costs,” Arodiogbu says.
CloudTrucks has built a mobile app where drivers can see loads coming from many different shippers across the country, and the company has an algorithm (called Schedule Optimizer) which helps drivers make better decisions on which loads to take to increase their revenue.
Along with the announcement of the funding round, CloudTrucks has rolled out a payment product called CT Cash.
“It helps users get paid faster so they don’t have to worry about getting paid in 30 or 45 days, or tracking which jobs they are paid or not paid for,” Arodiogbu says. “We take over all of that stuff so they can run their businesses with fewer headaches.”
According to Arodiogbu, CloudTrucks is lowering the bar of becoming independent for truck drivers.
“The full process after they sign up to the app is that they find all the leads and book them instantly, they have a calendar to manage their schedule, they have CT Cash to manage their payments, and everything is simplified.”
The way CloudTrucks generates revenue is by taking a flat rate of 13-15% percent of what the driver is generating on the platform.
The company, which launched in May of this year, has grown to $1.8M in freight transactions over the past 6 months and the company is growing 40% month over month, doing over 300 deliveries on a monthly basis.
Arodiogbu, who is originally from Nigeria and earned degrees from Penn State and Johns Hopkins, previously co-founded a company called Scotty Labs, which had raised $6 million and was acquired by DoorDash in 2019.
Arodiogbu met his cofounder Jin Shieh (who was born in Taiwan and serves as CTO) at Zenefits, where Shieh he was director of engineering, and Arodiogbu was a product manager. George Ezenna (who is also from Nigeria) and Arodiogbu worked together at Scotty Labs.
Ray Tonsing, founder and managing director at Caffeinated Capital, who led the Series A investment says that the company aims to try to empower small trucking firms and individual truck drivers with modern tools.
“The co-founders are really trying to create a consumer experience to modernize the business in a box toolkit for truck drivers,” Tonsing says. “Looking at it long term, the company is going to be about how it can help these drivers earn more money and optimize their time.”
CloudTrucks, which currently employs 13 people and is headquartered in San Francisco, previously raised $6.1 million in a seed round. With the $20.5 million Series A the total amount of equity funding in the company has grown to $26.6 million.
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