API integrations are crucial for trucking telematics corporations. They permit seamless communication amongst various systems, improve operational efficiency and accurate monitoring of fleet activities, and supply the flexibility to integrate with other industry-specific tools, enhancing overall fleet management capabilities.
For instance, 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 easy for banking information to be verified and guarded and promoting the event of progressive financial instruments.
Startup telematics integration solutions provider Terminal, trying to develop into the “Plaid of trucking,” announced Tuesday it has closed its seed round to proceed constructing upon its Unified API, giving corporations that construct insurance products, fleet software and other financial services the vehicle and locations data they need.
The investment round was led in September by Y Combinator and Golden Ventures with participation from 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 once they began to contemplate how API middleware could improve the transportation industry.
“For those two and a half years, we worked rather a lot with various middleware solutions and we realized how core a few of that infrastructure we built could be in unlocking all of the efficient tools that we had,” Giles told FreightWaves. “We felt that logistics had so many opportunities to experience this same unlocking.”
“At that time, we were open to solving all kinds of different problems, but what really connected for us was so many various people were running into the challenge of integrations,” said Midha. “Anybody attempting to construct any system, automation or platform inside logistics and trucking was spending as much as 50% or more of their time just on different integration types.”
Funding details: | Terminal |
---|---|
Funding amount | $3.1 million |
Funding round | Seed round |
Lead investors | Y Combinator and Golden Ventures |
Secondary investors | Wayfinder Ventures, Northside Ventures, McVestCo (Trimac Transportation enterprise arm), Boon Fund, Matt McKinney (Loop), Liz Wessel, JJ Fliegelman, Eli Brown |
Business goals for the round | Grow its team to proceed constructing current solution |
Total funding | $3.1 million |
The duo quickly learned that this was a particular pain point for the industry’s fintech ecosystem as well, and with their backgrounds, they set off to beat that challenge.
“We narrowed in on telematics for a few reasons,” said Midha. “One was the rise of adoption of telematics because of the ELD mandate just a few years back and the rise of adoption around dash cameras and other safety tools.”
The second reason was carriers became more comfortable with sharing this information with every type 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 easy for solutions providers like Samsara, Motive, Fleetmatics, TitanGPS, Isaac Instruments and others listed on its website to acquire this carrier information, giving true carrier data transparency.
Since Terminal rolled out its product this summer, greater than 150,000 trucks and their data have been integrated into its system as Terminal continues to construct its universal API for vehicle statistics.
![](https://www.freightwaves.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/12/Terminal-Dashboard-fleet.png)
“Our customer base is about half insurance firms, and the opposite half is primarily software corporations that sell to the carrier,” Midha said. “We began here because we wish to concentrate on the use cases that give probably the most profit to the carrier and provides probably the most incentive to them to share their data and really get something in return.”
In these cases, that might be lower insurance premiums and higher visibility to carriers’ logistics partners.
With its recent capital, Terminal is sticking to that plan, leveraging its relationship with its recent investment partners while constructing out more of the product and specializing in customer satisfaction and true return to carriers.
“The entire focus for us immediately is to construct our foundational engineering team so we are able to deliver on our guarantees to those customers, find areas of improvement, and establish success with our initial network of partners and add operational velocity to the corporate,” explained Midha.
.kt-btns_b75934-cc .kt-btn-wrap-0 {margin-right:5px;}.kt-btns_b75934-cc .kt-btn-wrap-0 .kt-button {color:#ffffff;background:rgba(52, 117, 182, 1);border-color:rgba(85, 85, 85, 1);}.kt-btns_b75934-cc .kt-btn-wrap-0 .kt-button:hover, .kt-btns_b75934-cc .kt-btn-wrap-0 .kt-button:focus {color:#ffffff;border-color:rgba(68, 68, 68, 1);}.kt-btns_b75934-cc .kt-btn-wrap-0 .kt-button::before {display:none;}.kt-btns_b75934-cc .kt-btn-wrap-0 .kt-button:hover, .kt-btns_b75934-cc .kt-btn-wrap-0 .kt-button:focus {background:rgba(68, 68, 68, 1);}@media (min-width: 768px) and (max-width: 1024px) {.kt-btns_b75934-cc .kt-btn-wrap-0 .kt-button {}}@media (max-width: 767px) {.kt-btns_b75934-cc .kt-btn-wrap-0 .kt-button {}}
Solvento pushing digitization with invoicing software, $53.5M in debt and recent funding
ISO goals for standardized service metrics across supply chains
Fillogic closes $13M Series A, grabs third spot on FreightTech 25
The post Terminal raises $3.1M, desires to be the ‘Plaid of trucking’ appeared first on FreightWaves.