By TechCrunch | Created at 2025-03-10 13:11:48 | Updated at 2025-03-10 16:22:50
3 hours ago
As the U.S. trucking industry gears up for the negative impacts of new Trump tariffs on goods from Mexico and Canada, a startup building a new kind of trucking insurance — a critical cost for truck drivers — has raised some money to grow, and (it hopes) help truckers weather the changes.
Nirvana, an AI-based insurance platform that uses real-time driving telematics plus 20 billion miles of truck driving data to build and manage insurance policies for truckers, has raised $80 million in new funding. The Series C will be used to build more services for fleets and individual drivers.
The investment values Nirvana at $830 million post-money. This is more than double Nirvana’s previous valuation of $350 million, dating from when it raised a Series B in October 2023.
Rushil Goel, Nirvana’s CEO and co-founder, described the round as “pre-emptive” — raised on the back of inbound interest rather than the startup needing the cash.
The investment is coming from three previous backers, with General Catalyst leading and Lightspeed Venture Partners and Valor Equity Partners participating.
The investors are doubling down amidst some growth for the San Francisco-based startup. Nirvana said that its total value in premiums under management is now at over $100 million, doubling in the last year.
Nirvana’s growth is coming at the nexus of a few trends.
The trucking industry is potentially an enormous market for Nirvana and others. Overall, U.S. trucking generated more than $900 billion in revenues in 2024, accounting for 77% of the freight market in the country, according to figures from the American Trucking Association. It employs around 8.5. million people, 3.5 million of them drivers, with some 14.3 million single-axle and combination trucks registered, accounting for some 5% of all motor vehicles in the country.
The industry has been on a trend for growth, up 1.6% in 2025 and projected to growth to some $1.46 trillion in revenues by 2035.
That was, however, before events of the last month — namely, Trump’s wider economic policies and specifically his push to institute import taxes on goods from Canada and Mexico in order to raise federal revenue, and to drive more domestic production.
“Imposing border taxes on our two largest and most important trading partners will undo… progress and raise costs for consumers,” said the American Trucking Association earlier this month. “The 100,000 full-time hardworking truckers hauling 85% of the surface trade in goods with Mexico and 67% of the goods traded with Canada will bear a direct and disproportionate impact.”
Not only will tariffs reduce cross-border freight, the association added, but they will also increase operational costs. The price tag of a new truck could rise by up to $35,000, it estimated, “amounting to a $2 billion annual tax and putting new equipment out of reach for small carriers.”
All of this boils down to trucking businesses needing to be more mindful than ever before of costs, and this is where Nirvana is hoping to play a part.
Or, to put it another way, this is where Nirvana needs to play a part — otherwise it might find itself hit by the same problems that are hitting its customers.
“The tariffs and related supply chain are disruptions that are certainly coming up,” Goel said in an interview. “And of course, in an industry like trucking, which drives 70% of the freight in the U.S., there’s certainly some impact of that to be expected. It’s our new reality.”
The company’s platform covers insurance both for fleets (groups of more than 10 ‘power units’) and non-fleets (1-9 units), and — like other new players in insurance — charging is usage-based, on a “pay as you drive” basis that also incorporates safety data using telematics from the vehicles plus data logged by the FMSCA, the trucking regulator.
That safety data also forms part of the company’s safety analytics product. In addition to this and the underwriting tech that Nirvana claims produces quotes 15 times faster than a traditional insurer, it also has built AI tools that it says automates and speeds up claims processing.
Similar to other legacy markets like industrial technology, trucking has been a ripe area for tech startups over the last several years.
Tapping into innovations in areas like cloud computing, AI, fintech, and connected vehicles, startups are spinning up new SaaS-based products to help drivers build out their businesses more efficiently and trucking companies run their fleets more seamlessly. Other companies in the same space include Lula (backed by Khosla and others), SmartHop, Fairmatic and CloudTrucks.
Beyond that, startups are taking ambitious swings at the trucks themselves, working on electric and autonomous vehicles for the next generation of transportation.
Similarly, insurance has been in the middle of an evolution. A wave of “insurtech” startups have rethought how to provision insurance for consumers. Playing on the concept of “neobanks” that create a more dynamic user experience on top of legacy infrastructure, much the same has played out among insurance startups. Alongside this, they are also tapping into innovations around big data and AI to rethink how services themselves are priced and provisioned.
General Catalyst declined to be interviewed for this story, but it’s notable that its biggest bigwig, CEO Hemant Taneja, is leading this round for the firm, a signal of its confidence on this particular bet.
“Insurance is traditionally a technologically bereft market, ripe for change. Nirvana is proving a disruptive model, finding rich data at scale and building AI around the complex steps of providing commercial insurance from quote through claims,” he said in a statement. “We’ve been excited to be a partner in their incredible results, and this investment will accelerate Nirvana even further.”
