Terminal raises $3.1M, wants to be the ‘Plaid of trucking’
API integrations are crucial for trucking telematics companies. They enable seamless communication among various systems, improve operational efficiency and accurate monitoring of fleet activities, and provide the ability to integrate with other industry-specific tools, enhancing overall fleet management capabilities.
For example, fintech solution Plaid significantly enhanced the banking community by providing seamless access to financial data and enabling secure transactions through its API services, making it simple for banking information to be verified and protected and promoting the development of innovative financial instruments.
Startup telematics integration solutions provider Terminal, looking to become the “Plaid of trucking,” announced Tuesday it has closed its seed round to continue building upon its Unified API, giving companies that build insurance products, fleet software and other financial services the vehicle and locations data they need.
The investment round was led in September by Golden Ventures with participation from Y Combinator, Wayfinder Ventures, Northside Ventures, McVestCo (Trimac Transportation), Boon Fund and angel investors Matt McKinney (Loop), Liz Wessel, JJ Fliegelman and Eli Brown.
Founders with fintech, trucking histories
Terminal was founded by CEO Raghav Midha and Chief Technology Officer Connor Giles, who bonded through their passion for fintech solutions and Giles’ family background in trucking. They worked together at a neobank on fintech solutions like Plaid when they began to consider how API middleware could improve the transportation industry.
“For those two and a half years, we worked a lot with various middleware solutions and we realized how core some of that infrastructure we built would be in unlocking all the efficient tools that we had,” Giles told FreightWaves. “We felt that logistics had so many opportunities to experience this same unlocking.”
“At that point, we were open to solving all sorts of different problems, but what really connected for us was so many different people were running into the challenge of integrations,” said Midha. “Anybody trying to build any system, automation or platform within logistics and trucking was spending up to 50% or more of their time just on different integration types.”
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The duo quickly learned that this was a specific pain point for the industry’s fintech ecosystem as well, and with their backgrounds, they set off to overcome that challenge.
“We narrowed in on telematics for a couple of reasons,” said Midha. “One was the increase of adoption of telematics due to the ELD mandate a few years back and the increase of adoption around dash cameras and other safety tools.”
The second reason was carriers became more comfortable with sharing this information with all types of supply chain solutions providers, including visibility tools, transportation management systems, financial services and insurance providers.
Today, Terminal’s product does just that, making it simple for solutions providers like Samsara, Motive, Fleetmatics, TitanGPS, Isaac Instruments and others listed on its website to obtain this carrier information, giving true carrier data transparency.
Terminal rolled out its product this summer and has more than 150,000 trucks’ data committed to being integrated into its system. The company plans to utilize this data while building its universal API for vehicle statistics.
“Our customer base is about half insurance companies, and the other half is primarily software companies that sell to the carrier,” Midha said. “We started here because we want to focus on the use cases that give the most benefit to the carrier and give the most incentive to them to share their data and actually get something in return.”
In these cases, that could be lower insurance premiums and better visibility to carriers’ logistics partners.
With its new capital, Terminal is sticking to that plan, leveraging its relationship with its new investment partners while building out more of the product and focusing on customer satisfaction and true return to carriers.
“The whole focus for us right now is to build our foundational engineering team so we can deliver on our promises to these customers, find areas of improvement, and establish success with our initial network of partners and add operational velocity to the company,” explained Midha.
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