Toronto-based Terminal, a trucking telematics integrations startup, has closed a $3.1-million USD ($4.2 million CAD) seed round after being one of seven Canadian-affiliated companies participating in Y Combinator’s Summer 2023 cohort.
Terminal has 150,000 trucks committed to integrating into its system, according to FreightWaves.
The round was led by Golden Ventures, and featured participation from Y Combinator, Wayfinder Ventures, Northside Ventures, McVestCo VC and a group of angel investors that included Loop co-founder and CEO Matt McKinney.
Terminal will use the funding to expand its team, the company said in a LinkedIn post.
Co-founded last year by CEO Raghav Midha and CTO Connor Giles, who previously held product and engineering leadership roles at New York-based neobank NorthOne, were inspired by Plaid’s application programming interface (API) securely linking data across financial networks.
Terminal offers its own API which allows insurance products and fleet software access to GPS data, speeding data, and other digitized vehicle stats collected through electronic logging devices (ELDs), known collectively as telematics, all in one place. According to the company’s Y Combinator page, the product aims to help companies building products for transportation, logistics, and fleet management which can spend up to 40 percent of their engineering capacity on integrations.
RELATED: Meet the Y Combinator Summer 2023 cohort startups with Canadian connections
The growing number of telematics, and the disorganized nature of having separate telematics providers for needs from GPS to LEDs, has been a pain point for trucking fleet owners which require the integrations for regulated safety and insurance purposes.
In October 2022, the general manager of transportation safety and compliance for trucking company CF Logistics, Ed Reardon, told FleetOwner that his fleet uses a stand-alone system for its electronic logging devices, meaning a separate provider for its transportation management system, its inventory, and its invoicing system.
“The three of them don’t even know the others exist,” Reardon said to FleetOwner. “That leaves us a mess, and there is no way of getting out of that right now.”
According to FreightWaves, Terminal rolled out its offering this summer and has 150,000 trucks committed to integrating into its system.
Feature image by Marcin Jozwiak on Unsplash.