Nirvana Insurance — Data-driven insurance for commercial fleets and the connected supply chain
It’s not news to anyone that the global supply chain is under extreme duress, which some fear has the potential to slow down global GDP growth. One of the key constituents in the supply chain is the commercial trucking industry. The commercial trucking industry in the US alone is around $800B employing more than 3 million drivers. Despite being such an important part of the supply chain, the commercial trucking industry is facing massive challenges with driver shortages and rising costs of operations.
As it is, commercial fleets are a very low margin business, on top of it, the insurance costs are a good 7–10% of their total operating costs. What’s worse is that these insurance costs have been rising steadily, growing 42%+ in the last decade!!! The problem is so severe that several trucking companies have shut down due to their inability to pay the high insurance premiums.
While insurance premiums are rising, there has been almost no change in the way most insurers underwrite. The underwriting does not take into account the driving behavior. Even the safest fleets have seen their insurance premiums rise. With that said, the infrastructure needed to collect driving data was not there until recently. Thanks to the Electronic Logging Devices (ELD) mandate, the majority of the trucks now have telematics devices, creating an opportunity to build a large insurer with more robust underwriting that incorporates driving behavior.
Enter Nirvana Insurance. Nirvana is a technology-driven platform that modernizes commercial fleet insurance using vast amounts of data from sensors on trucks. The company uses telematics data to transform the stubbornly analog world of truck insurance to help fleets mitigate risk; improve driver performance; drop costs, and make the insurance process easier for everyone.
The Nirvana platform connects billions of data points from these telematics and AI-powered dashcams, as well as public sources like the DMV and the department of transportation. Location, speed, video, erratic driving, weather, and traffic are all factors that are assessed by Nirvana’s bespoke machine-learning algorithms. Nirvana also gives regular recommendations to its clients, including specific coaching for drivers, as well as routes to avoid. The process of finding insurance has historically been so slow and tedious, oftentimes taking several weeks just to get a quote, and Nirvana solves for this by providing instantaneous quotes.
Early-stage investing is a lot about finding and backing the best teams solving large problems. Nirvana was started by an all-star team with the right experience and founder-market fit. Rushil Goel (Co-founder and CEO) was previously the product leader at Samsara where he saw first-hand the adoption of telematics and AI dashcams in commercial fleets. I’ve known Rushil for many years now and it was clear to me from the beginning that Rushil is a rare combination of high intellectual bandwidth, technical know-how, product chops, drive, and vision to build a massive business combined with a track record of excellent execution. So when Rushil decided to start Nirvana alongside his exceptional co-founders Abhay Mitra (formerly from Lightspeed-backed Rubrik) and Alex Carges (formerly from Root Insurance) we knew we had to be in business with them.
Today, Nirvana emerges from stealth after raising $25M. Lightspeed is proud to back the company from Day One and lead both the Seed and the Series A rounds.
In the last year since the company was founded, we have been extremely impressed with how this team operates. They’ve exceeded almost every single goal they set out for themselves and have continuously raised the bar. Whether it’s building the best product or driving customer satisfaction, the Nirvana team always sets up high goals and makes it a point to exceed them.
And while Nirvana is already off to a great start with unprecedented customer demand, what excites us the most is that commercial fleets are just the first frontier, the ambitions of Nirvana go much beyond — to help companies manage risk across the entire supply chain by leveraging data.
