Hauler Hero, an AI-powered operating system for waste management companies, announced it has raised $16 million in Series A funding led by Frontier Growth, with participation from Disruptive Founders Fund, Somersault Ventures, and several waste industry and ServiceTitan executives. The New York-based company said the new capital follows a year of rapid expansion and will be used to scale its suite of AI tools for waste haulers, which are currently in beta.
The company is targeting a $145 billion waste management industry that it says has largely been left behind in the broader software and AI transformation. While digital workflows have modernized many sectors, much of the waste collection industry still relies on paper route sheets, legacy on-premise systems, and manual processes. Hauler Hero aims to replace those fragmented systems with a unified AI-driven platform purpose-built for waste and recycling operators.
Hauler Hero’s platform serves as a centralized operating system for haulers, automating invoicing, routing, dispatch, and customer engagement through a single interface. By streamlining workflows, the company says it saves office staff more than 14 hours per week on administrative tasks, improving cash collection, reducing churn, and enabling fleet expansion without adding headcount.
The company is also developing a new suite of AI agents. Hero Vision is a truck-based camera system that uses computer vision to detect service issues and revenue opportunities. Hero Chat is designed to automate text, email, and chat communications with residents, handling routine inquiries in real time. Hero Routing leverages data from millions of service stops to dynamically optimize routes, reduce fuel consumption, and accommodate real-time exceptions. Together, these tools aim to shift waste operations from reactive management to proactive, exception-based oversight, helping operators identify missed services, routing inefficiencies, and billing discrepancies.
Over the past year, Hauler Hero has doubled its customer base and now supports more than 200 waste management organizations, ranging from independent haulers to municipalities and operators such as West Oahu Aggregate, City of Sunnyvale, City of Redlands, and Greenleaf Recycling. Customers use the platform to complete approximately 4.5 million pickups per month, process more than $300 million in annualized gross merchandise value, and serve over 750,000 commercial and residential waste generators through its service and payment portal.
KEY QUOTES
“Hauler Hero has transformed how we operate. We’ve cut billing time in half and automated our routing, which means our team can focus on growth instead of paperwork. The platform scales with us, and we can manage everything from our phones and handle more customers without adding administrative staff. We’re serving 25,000 customers now, and I have no doubt that when we get to 100,000 customers and beyond, Hauler Hero will be right there to keep up with that growth.”
Alex Babbitt, Owner And Founder, Carolina Waste
“Hauler Hero’s team is passionate about improving workflows in a massive, underserved vertical that is critical to the health and safety of every community across the country. They aren’t just selling software, they are fundamentally changing the unit economics of waste collection.”
Dave Pandullo, Partner, Frontier Growth
“Waste collection is one of the most essential services in society, yet it’s been run on outdated tools for decades. We’re building the operating system that finally brings modern data, automation, and AI to the people who keep our villages, cities, and industries running every day.”
Mark Hoadley, Co-Founder And CEO, Hauler Hero
