Los Angeles-based Nevoya came out of stealth last year with an ambitious goal of defeating EV truck recruitment Logjam. Nevoya has made ample progress in its goal of attracting investors, earning a $9.3 million seed round and was able to move faster.
The young company that buys electric trucks and provides them to shippers is currently transporting goods to 10 different Fortune 500 companies. More importantly, we serve California businesses as carriers with Parity, which has similarly sized diesel trucks.
It is a remarkable achievement, especially during a period of increasing anti-EV headwinds. This is supported by a government that publicly criticized green energy.
Founder Sami Khan is not in the flaws.
The idea of reducing carbon emissions remains attractive to the Fortune 500, Khan told TechCrunch. Khan said he believes Nevoya is running a much faster, more lean and better career business than legacy operators by leveraging AI.
Nevoya applies AI to optimize trucking routes, matching luggage with the right trucks, balancing it, and maximizing efficiency while minimizing energy consumption. The company also uses AI to help organize charging schedules and battery management.
“When we started running our trucking business,” Khan said. [everybody was] Doing so, we looked closely at what was going on every minute. We have concluded that 90% of what is going on can be automated or semi-automated. ”
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Khan said Nevoya’s automation is getting information to drivers faster, with fewer mistakes than humans make. He also said that leveraging AI will not replace dispatchers, but will release them to better communicate with Nevoya customers.
The challenges of “Go Big” fundraising
Khan hopes that this model will continue to grow thanks to Nevoya’s new seed round. This was a fundraiser that was originally much more conservative.
Late last year, with a pre-seed round in the rearview mirror and a number of early traction Neboya’s all-electric trucking fleet, Kahn looked at options for how to grow his company. Or will it grow bigger?
That’s when Kahn spoke to Sean XU of Low Carbon Capital. Xu introduced Khan and co-founder John Verdon (formerly head of business development at Waymo), and closely followed Nevoya, but hadn’t invested yet. Xu’s message was clear: go for it.
“[Xu] Basically I said, no, no, no, I’m going to do a big round now. Khan said. “Frankly, I was really verifying investors in the first round who said, ‘We’re sitting on the sidelines and coming to the next round and taking the lead.’
LowerCarbon led Nevoya’s $9.3 million seed round and just closed, Khan told TechCrunch in an exclusive interview. Floating Points and LMNT Ventures joined together with existing investors’ third-party, stepchange and Never Lift. Qasar Younis, founder and CEO of Buzzy Selfunving AI Company, also invested in Intuition.
That funding will be directed to expanding Neboya beyond California to new states like Texas. The company is already transporting cargo in Houston and Dallas.
Texas Expansion
It will help Neboya generate more revenue, but Khan quickly pointed out that much work should be done in these new markets before even reaching the cost parity of diesel trucks. He also said that Neboya must be more creative about how to manage her fleet in places like Texas, due to her lack of infrastructure.
This includes workarounds, such as charging your truck overnight at a train station that is usually dedicated to passenger cars.
Kahn framed this as a win-win. These locations earn additional revenue during off-peak times, and Nevoya expands quickly at high and low costs. He said the plan would ultimately be to invest in building a more dedicated charging infrastructure.
To manage this expansion, Khan said Nevoya is leaning towards the same model that companies like Uber used when they entered new locations. Nevoya hires a general manager who runs its own location, like a startup.
“The competitive element of attacking these incredibly smart and talented general managers on each other is really effective in driving the next level of performance in the business,” he said.
Xu said he was the first to refrain from investing in Neboya. Because he wanted the company to prove that it could parity with Diesel.
“We want to understand appetite and verification from the market,” he recalls thinking. But he said he felt that “the business like this must exist.”
Xu saw Nevoya going on and remembered what he had said to Khan. The two talk about optimizing fleet management with more artificial intelligence, while simultaneously focusing on an autonomous future (and therefore including Applied Intuition’s Younis in the round).
“They’re getting lower costs per mile. They’re reducing maintenance costs. AI orchestration for the efficiency of route optimization is beginning to pay off,” he said. “Yeah, we’ve got a much bigger round up and we’ve been forced to be oversubscribed than we expected, and now we’re out to race.”
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