Bringing Trucking into the Digital Age: Why Toro TMS?
Transportation and logistics is on the cusp of a technology revolution, what Jeff Bezos would call “an inevitable.” Today, we are still in the first inning and see a multi-decade opportunity to bring trucking workflow and commerce online. At Toro TMS, we are motivated to change the world by leading the digital transformation of a massively underserved industry and are heads-down building an all-in-one SaaS platform to manage end-to-end workflow, commerce, and financial services.
Trucking is an $800 billion market that’s at the core of our economy, yet we were surprised to find that trucking carriers have been largely ignored when it comes to cloud-based workflow software. We’ve seen firsthand the challenges that come with running and growing a trucking company. Over the last few years, I’ve been a partner at IGSB Holdings, a family-owned investment holding company in Santa Barbara with roots in agriculture and trucking. Our trucking company, Carpinteria Motor Transport, was founded in 1941 by my partner Tim Bliss’s grandfather, and has hauled produce for many of the major farm growers along California’s Central Coast. As we looked for technology solutions to help enable our company’s growth, we were disappointed to find that there aren’t any good software systems out there for small and medium-sized trucking carriers like ours.
The unique thing about our history at IGSB is that over the last few decades, we’ve exclusively focused on investing in best-in-class B2B software and have taken a leading role in building over 30 software and technology companies. Since 2008 we’ve helped build AppFolio, today a 1,500 employee $6 billion public company (NASDAQ: APPF) that’s the leading provider of software for the real estate property management industry. Prior to that, we were the lead shareholders in Advent Software (now part of SS&C Technologies), today a $18 billion market cap and 22,000 employee financial technology company. We’ve also built PickTrace, the leading modern provider of farm management software for the largest growers in the country. We uniquely sit at the intersection of having decades of firsthand experience in trucking and decades of experience building world-class software companies. Toro TMS was founded based on the combination of those two parts of our heritage, and we’re excited to build an enduring company that drives lasting improvements for the trucking industry.
We are currently hard at work building an all-in-one, cloud-based operating system designed for small and medium-sized trucking companies to run their entire businesses. Asset-based trucking carriers use our software across the entire order lifecycle, from order intake, rating, and dispatch to billing, accounting, payroll, payments, factoring and everything in between. We help truck carriers grow their businesses and their fleets without having to grow office costs and headcount. Toro TMS provides trucking companies a single view of their business and all their loads and customers across channels. This enables our customers to manage drivers and equipment, process orders and payments, build customer relationships, and leverage analytics and reporting. Carriers will also be able to use Toro TMS Mobile, our Android and iPhone mobile application, to manage their business on the go.
A carrier truck yard
Massive Opportunity to Create Long-Lasting Impact
We think the business opportunity is enormous given the pain we’re seeing among carriers. What we’re hearing from customers is that they’re struggling to grow efficiently. They’re struggling to a) keep up with incoming orders, b) dispatch their drivers and trucks, and c) understand how profitable they truly are, especially as they get larger. We’ve visited numerous customers on site and have witnessed their offices buried under reams of paper, and they’re held back by inefficient manual processes. In cases where they do consider technology tools, they’re forced to pay $100,000 or more for clunky 1980s legacy software, pay for a custom development shop to build something that’s impossible to maintain over time, or struggle to stitch together 5–10 different point solutions on their own. Similar to great mission-driven companies such as Stripe and Shopify, we believe by serving our customers (often small and mid-size businesses) and helping them grow, we are transforming the lives of millions of families who are hardworking trucking owners, employees, and drivers across America.
A customer’s manual order management done via paper/pen
290 crates of paper files (such as that in the image above), accumulated over more than 3 years due to trucking carriers’ lack of cloud-based software. We’ve seen this over and over…
Why our team is best suited to build Toro TMS
Our team is uniquely positioned to tackle this opportunity because of our experience building billion-dollar industry-specific software companies in the past and our specific domain expertise in trucking. Our product and engineering leaders built AppFolio, the leading SaaS platform for the real estate property management industry, and Procore, the leading SaaS platform for the construction industry. These two companies have each created $5 billion of enterprise value over the last decade.We are now running a similar playbook in the trucking industry. The software opportunity in trucking today looks remarkably similar to the opportunity in property management or construction a decade ago: huge industry core to the economy, large mid market of customers who are held back by their paper/pen processes and 1980s technology, and no modern software players who are alleviating customers’ massive pain. We’ve built multi-decade, multi-billion dollar software companies before in real estate property management and construction. The opportunity to do so in trucking is as large if not larger than in any other industry.
In addition to our expertise in building industry-specific software companies, we’ve also got a ton of specific domain expertise in trucking. We’ve hired rockstar engineers and product managers from Samsara and Convoy, two of the leading technology providers in trucking tackling the IoT and freight brokerage spaces. Over the past year, our team has also completed hundreds of on-site visits with our customers, understanding their businesses, seeing their problems firsthand, and testing our solutions.
This combination of world-class software company building experience and accumulated trucking domain knowledge uniquely positions us to deliver technology that drives lasting improvements for the trucking industry.
Culture
We believe our people are our greatest asset, and everything we do revolves around making sure we bring out the true potential of our teammates. Take engineering for example. In most software companies, engineers are often treated like resources, while at Toro TMS, we believe our engineering colleagues are at the heart of our company. They are incredible builders and visionaries who are passionate about solving customer problems. Each engineer on our team takes ownership over a significant part of the product we’re delivering to our customers.
Similarly, in most software companies, engineers are often hearing about customer problems secondhand from product managers or sales reps. However, at Toro TMS, we take the opposite approach. Our engineers (and all members of our team) are often engaging with our customers and visiting them on-site as part of product discovery. We take this same inclusive approach across every function in our organization. By ensuring all our teammates get to engage with customers, we get to leverage the full extent of our talent to find creative solutions and solve customer pain.
Our current team is growing rapidly and come from market-leading companies such as AppFolio, ProCore, Samsara, Convoy, Google, Qualtrics, and Justworks. While we are still in the early innings, we hope you will continue to follow us and/or join us in the journey.
Toro TMS is Hiring 💻 🚀
We are actively hiring talented individuals across software engineering, product management, sales, customer success, and HR/recruiting. Please reach out to jamie@torotms.com! 👋