Over the years, fleet management software used by trucking companies has languished in the old technology world. Old school companies like Truckingoffice in the U.S., or Mandata, Stirling and Roadrunner in the UK have been managing fleets, personnel, jobs and invoices for many years. Plus, lots of paper.
But the profit margins are shrinking in the haulage industry, the fuel prices are rising, and regulations compliance is getting tougher. Trucking is a complex, administration-heavy business, involving a lot of paperwork. And this is a market dominated by uber-expensive enterprise systems, (paper, again) and Microsoft Excel.
So it’s high time cloud services started disrupting this arena. One is Keeptruckin, which we’ve covered previously.
To that end, TruckTrack, a Belgrade/London-based SaaS startup exhibiting in the Disrupt NY Startup Alley today, has launched the beta version of its app with a handful of early adopters and is preparing for a roll out in the UK market in the coming months. It’s also raised a €260,000 seed round, largely from London early stage fund Passion Capital.
This has expanded the tech team in Belgrade and created a presence in London for business development.
TruckTrack is a cloud app that covers all the processes in fleet management and it’s aimed at small and medium-sized trucking companies, exposing data to improve those businesses. The UK industry size is estimated to be $66bn, with the U.S. market set at $500bn. But in both markets 90% of companies have fewer than 20 trucks in their fleet, which is why it makes sense to have a more lightweight and nimble cloud plus apps solution.
The idea for the company came from the mom of the company CEO, Vuk Nikolić, who has run a trucking business for 10 years. He had been making Excel sheets for the business, but realised there would be a better way… hence this startup.