- TrueNorth, a company founded by Jin Stedge, has a goal of fixing the inefficiencies that are built into the fragmented trucking industry
TrueNorth, a company founded by Jin Stedge, has a goal of fixing the inefficiencies that are built into the fragmented trucking industry. Currently, TrueNorth is part of the winter batch at Y Combinator and the company raised $600,000 from a group of renowned investors reported Crunchbase News. Some of the investors include Y Combinator, Lattice CEO Jack Altman, Rippling CEO Parker Conrad, and Eaze CSO Peter Fishman.
Stedge was adopted when she was a child by a family of truckers. And growing up in that environment gave her personal insights about the industry. In the 1980s, her grandparents were truckers. And Stedge believes very little has changed from a technology perspective since then.
Stedge’s cousin Tom is a trucker and “he still operates primarily on phone calls and mail.” And Stedge told Crunchbase News that most of the financial tools in the industry “are clunky at best, predatory at worst.”
TrueNorth does not lease trucks. Essentially the company provides truckers with a platform for managing insurance, fuel, and maintenance. Plus it also helps truckers set up route optimization, load coordination, and dispatch.
Along with Stedge, TrueNorth was also founded by Sanjaya Wijeratne. Wijeratne previously worked as an engineer at Scotty Labs, Sixup PBC, and SimilarWeb. Stedge had also worked at Scotty Labs.
Generally, truckers have to choose between working with a large fleet company like JB Hunt with little independence. Or truckers have to give up revenue by running a solo operation. TrueNorth provides an alternative by offering large-fleet resources with a lower take rate than traditional companies since its back-office is powered by software.
