Maven Machines Raises $7 Million To Scale Up Fleet Management Platform

Maven Machines, fleet management and telematics provider, announced Wednesday it has raised $7 million in Series A funding led by Allos Ventures, with participation from Hearst Ventures, Riverfront Ventures, Great Oaks Venture Capital and existing private investors.

The newly raised financing is a growth round for Maven, with the startup planning to triple its workforce in 2020 across all departments, including engineering, operations, sales and marketing. The investment will also help expedite the development of its technology platform.

Avi Geller, CEO of Maven, described Maven as a technology company focused on helping carriers operate as efficiently as possible while staying compliant with regulations.

"We help carriers with everything, including telematics, ELD, vehicle inspection reporting, driver safety technology and driver performance scoring, amongst other services," Geller told FreightWaves. "We also help with driver workflows that are made flexible and configurable for different use cases to help truckers drive more efficiently."

Before founding Maven, Geller spent several years working with SAP and a few other companies in the enterprise software space. Maven took shape when he realized the trucking industry, massive as it is, was significantly behind in terms of technology and relied extensively on manual processes and paper documents.

"The industry ran its communication via phone calls or text messages. A lot of the knowledge was tribal, existing in the minds of planners, dispatchers and managers. I saw that the current technology in the market was based on proprietary and expensive hardware, which was bolted on trucks or were servers in the basement of trucking company offices," Geller said.

"I realized that the industry can greatly benefit from a modern, cloud-based IoT software platform. This was about six years ago, and we've been building up a platform ever since," he continued.

John McIlwraith, managing director at Allos Ventures, praised Maven as an industry leader in cloud-based fleet management systems.

"The software suite which Avi and the team have developed is truly impressive," said McIlwraith, who will be joining Maven's board of directors. "The company is a great example of a founder-led, capital-efficient B2B SaaS business that we like to invest in."

Maven currently focuses on medium to large enterprise clients, having developed a robust platform designed to handle large and complex operations. "Our system gathers real-time data and has the highest possible resolution in the quality of data," Geller said. "The management gets visibility into its fleet's performance, where processes are inefficient and how they can be improved."

Maven's dispatching and routing software creates optimized routes, provides real-time visibility to dispatchers and shippers, and accurately determines estimated time of arrival of freight when it is picked up.

"What we're offering is a mission-critical solution over which our customers run their businesses. This is something we take very seriously and work on maintaining the reliability and stability of the system," Geller said.

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