Nick Martel, Hayden Cardiff and Andrew Russell met as graduate students at Carnegie Mellon.
Idelic
While Hayden Cardiff was finishing his M.B.A. at Carnegie Mellon, he started consulting for Pitt Ohio, a small freight trucking company headquartered in Pittsburgh. Though he had already worked with his classmate Thomas Healy to launch electric truck startup Hyliion—which went on to go public last fall—Cardiff never expected that trucking would become his thing. “If you had asked me 10 or 15 years ago if I would’ve gotten into trucking, I would’ve told you absolutely not,” Cardiff, 31, says.
Now, Cardiff, along with his cofounders and former CMU classmates Nick Martel, 36, and Andrew Russell, 30, is set to announce a $20 million series B raised by Idelic, a startup that applies AI and machine learning to data from trucking fleets in order to ensure driver safety and streamline logistics. As the threat of “nuclear verdicts”—jury awards in accident lawsuits that exceed $10 million—continues to drive up insurance costs for commercial auto, Idelic also hopes to use its software to reduce them.
The round is led by Boston-based Highland Capital Partners, with participation from AXA Venture Partners. While Idelic and its investors declined to quote specific revenue or valuation metrics associated with the raise, both cited “rapid growth” as a motivating factor.
None of this would’ve happened if it hadn’t been for “Safety Box,” a data-integrating technology that Pitt Ohio had built internally, and which Cardiff speculated could be refined and expanded to be usable by fleets of all shapes and sizes. Teaming up with Martel and Russell, Cardiff offered Pitt Ohio a small piece of equity in what was to become a boot-strapped business in exchange for resources and proprietary access to its tech. Thus, the germ of Idelic—named for the sort of industry idyll the company hopes its software will eventually facilitate—was born.
Idelic is not the only company adamant about bringing trucking, an $800 billion industry, up-to-speed with the digital age. The past decade has seen the advent of several SaaS solutions for previously disintegrated data-collection systems that allow companies to do everything from streamline the way truck brokerages match vehicles with goods to track the location and activity of individual trucks in a fleet in real time. Where Idelic differentiates itself is in its focus on safety, capitalizing on AI and ML to collate and generate fleet data with the goal not only of saving lives, but also of lining pockets: fewer accidents, Cardiff and Martel explain, mean higher driver retention (a massive industry problem), and, lower insurance premiums.
“Right now if a fleet has any type of blemish on their record, their rates go up 150 to 200%,” Cardiff says. “That’s untenable. Fleets can’t continue to survive that way, but we as a public still need and demand our goods to be transferred from one place to another…We want to be at the forefront of solving that.”
When fleets adopt Idelic’s software, Cardiff and Martel contend, the savings on insurance coverage and other costs can be substantial. They cited one example in which a fleet of 25 drivers began to use Idelic and in a single year, lowered its accident costs more than $200,000. “They were able to go out and get better premiums,” Cardiff says.
Craig Driscoll, a Highland Capital general partner who will be joining Idelic’s board, sees real value in the company’s insurance strategy. “The more you talk to their insurance partners, the more you realize the opportunity here for these guys to leverage data and provide a better solution to improve safety and reduce risk for these large customers,” Driscoll says.
Though Cardiff and Martel admit that Covid-19’s effects on freight operations have been trying, both for Idelic and for the trucking companies it serves, they are optimistic about the way forward. They hope to use the funds they’ve raised to grow their company by bringing more customers onboard, expanding on their core products, and continuing to work with fleets and carriers to lower insurance costs, all without losing sight of their original mission: “We want every driver to come home safe each and every night,” Martel says.
