With high fuel costs, Trucker-focused Fintech AtoB reaches $800m valuation
AtoB co-founders (left to right) Harshita Arora, Vignan Velivela and Tushar Misra
AtoB
For the nation’s 3.4 million truck drivers, fuel costs are a huge deal. San Francisco-based startup AtoB aims to help lower them with a payment system specially designed for truckers.
While many tech startups have struggled recently, AtoB recently closed a previously undisclosed funding round that values the company at $800 million, co-founder and CEO Vignan Velivela told Forbes. The venture funding includes $75 million in equity, led by Elad Gil and General Catalyst, and an additional $80 million in debt financing. The funding will help AtoB, which has largely operated under the radar, to expand.
“We had higher term sheets, but we decided to go with better quality investors,” Velivela says. “There is a good healthy appetite from investors when the business model is strong.”
Three years ago, Velivela, 32, who had previously worked as a robotics engineer at self-driving car company Cruise, teamed up with Tushar Misra (ex-Uber) and Harshita Arora (who had developed a cryptocurrency price tracking app) to launch an Uber for buses. After Covid hit, they quickly moved to set up a Stripe or Square for truck drivers.
When they traveled to trucking hubs like Stockton, Calif., to find out what truckers needed, they learned about fuel cards offered by Wex and Fleetcor and thought they could do better. With AtoB, they built a dashboard where truckers could see the price of fuel, their exact fuel costs and the like, all linked to their fleet tracking software. “We can use telematics to prevent fraud and improve fuel efficiency,” Velivela says.
With a zero-fee fuel card, which offers a discount of five cents per gallon, winning over some 25,000 trucking companies and other commercial drivers (think school buses and ambulances) and the recent launch of a new payroll product, revenue is expected to exceed 20 million this year, up from an estimated $2 million in 2021. The rapid growth helped the company qualify for this year’s Forbes Next Billion-Dollar Startups list, one of 25 companies we think are most likely to reach a value of 1 billion dollars.
“It’s one of the fastest-growing businesses we’re involved in,” says General Catalyst managing partner Hemant Taneja, noting that it’s rare for the VC firm to double down on leading a funding round as it did here. “Their go-to-market model and the way they’ve scaled is amazing. It’s hard to get that many customers that quickly.”
AtoB is now rolling out a new product to help truckers cover the costs of fleet management and maintenance. And work is being done to set up bank accounts, sponsored through a bank, aimed at truck drivers. International expansion, starting with Canada and Mexico, is also in the works. As for the fuel card, Velivela reckons that when transport goes electric, it will help truck drivers to charge more efficiently at lower costs as well.
“We want payments to be as reliable as the Internet,” Velivela says. “That’s just not the reality of the trucking business today because the infrastructure is outdated.”
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