By building a new kind of trucking insurance, the US trucking industry has raised some money to help truckers survive the change as it negatively impacts President Donald Trump’s new tariffs on goods imported from Mexico and Canada.
Nirvana, an AI-based insurance platform that uses real-time driving telematics and 20 billion miles of truck driving data to build and manage truck driver insurance contracts, has raised $80 million in Series C round funding. Fresh cash is used to build more services for fleets and individual drivers.
The investment is $830 million in post money by Nirvana, more than double the previous valuation of $350 million in October 2023.
Rushil Goel, CEO and co-founder of Nirvana, described the round as “first.” This was raised following inbound profits rather than startups need cash.
The investment comes from three previous supporters. General Catalyst leads the round, with Lightspeed Venture Partners and Valor Equity Partners.
Investors have doubled after decent growth at San Francisco-based startups. Nirvana said the premiums are more than doubled since last year, under management of more than $100 million.
This growth has come to link several trends.
The trucking industry is a huge market for potentially Nirvana and others. Overall, the US trucking industry generated more than $900 billion in revenue in 2024, accounting for 77% of the domestic freight market, according to the US Trucking Association. I use about 8.5. One million, of which 3.5 million are drivers, with approximately 14.3 million registered single axles and combination trucks, accounting for around 5% of all cars in the country.
The industry is expected to increase by 1.6% in 2025, with revenues projected to rise to $1.46 trillion by 2035.
But that was before Trump outlined his broader economic policy last month. In particular, his driving force for introducing import taxes on goods from Canada and Mexico to raise federal revenues and promote domestic production was outlined.
“We will revert to imposing border taxes on our two largest and most important trading partners […] The American Truck Transport Association said earlier this month. “100,000 full-time hardworking truckers carrying 85% of the surface trade of goods with Mexico and 67% of the goods traded with Canada have a direct and disproportionate effect.”
Not only will tariffs reduce cross-border freight, it will also increase operational costs, the association added. The price of the new truck could rise up to $35,000, and estimated it would “compared to $2 billion in taxes per year, leaving new equipment from small airlines out of reach.”
All this means that the trucking business needs to know more about costs than ever before. That’s where Nirvana wants to play a role. It’s also where you need to play some so that Nirvana doesn’t realize they’re facing the same problems as their customers.
“The tariffs and related supply chains are certainly a disruption that is approaching,” Goel said in an interview. “And of course, in an industry like trucking that drives 70% of US freight, there’s certainly an impact of what we’re expecting. That’s our new reality.”
The company’s platform covers both fleets (a group of over 10 “power units”) and non-fleet (1-9 units) insurance. Like other newer players in insurance, they charge based on usage. It uses telematics from the vehicle to incorporate safety data using data and data recorded by the Federal Motor Vehicle Carrier Safety Agency, the Truck Transport Regulatory Authority.
That safety data is also part of the company’s safety analysis products. In addition to this and underwriting technology Nirvana claims, it also builds AI tools that automate and speed up claim processing by creating quotes 15 times faster than traditional insurance companies.
Like other legacy markets like industrial technology, trucking has been a ripe field for high-tech startups for the past few years.
Leveraging innovation in areas such as cloud computing, AI, fintech and connected vehicles, startups are spinning up new SaaS-based products to enable drivers to build their business and trucking companies to run their fleets more seamlessly. Other companies in the space include Lula, Smarthop, Fairmatic and CloudTrucks.
The startup has an ambitious swing on the truck itself, working on electricity and autonomous vehicles for the next generation of transportation.
Similarly, insurance is in the midst of evolving. In addition to legacy infrastructure, something similar to the concept of “neobank” that creates a more dynamic user experience is being rolled out among insurance startups. We also leverage innovation, focusing on big data and AI, to rethink how services are priced and provisioned.
Catalyst General declined to interview this story, but it’s worth noting that the biggest Bigwig, CEO Hemant Taneja, leads this round.
“Insurance has traditionally been a technologically disappointing market and is ripe for change. Nirvana has proven a disruptive model, finding a wealth of data at scale and building AI around the complex steps of providing commercial insurance from estimates through claims,” Taneja said in a statement. “We are excited to be partners with their incredible outcomes, and this investment will accelerate Nirvana even more.”
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