Idelic made big headlines a few weeks ago announcing its $20 million series-B venture round. We are excited to welcome Idelic CEO Hayden Cardiff to Business as Usual to talk about the big raise and its plan for growth in Pittsburgh.
Idelic is leader in commercial trucking analytics and driver management solutions.
Hayden will talk about the new round and how Idelic makes trucking safer and more efficient by preventing accidents, reducing driver turnover, lowering insurance costs, and—most importantly—saving lives.
Its flagship product, Safety Suite®, is the most comprehensive driver management platform in the transportation industry, integrating data from multiple technology sources into a single system of record that enhances workflows and provides unparalleled fleet analytics.
Transcription:
Well, I hope everyone can hear that. That was thanks to Jonathan kersting. We are this is Audrey Russo. Welcome to business. As usual midweek, we have a great show. And Jonathan was riffing off of a theme of our guests. I'll introduce Hayden Cardiff in a moment. And that was trucking by the Grateful Dead. So Jonathan's definitely dating himself. And we can, we can see, we're gonna be talking about trucking today, but we're gonna be talking with idyllic. So I want to thank everyone for being here today, we are always excited to talk to people who are building amazing companies, right? in Pittsburgh in our backyard and telling stories to the world. Today is definitely no exception, as you know, Jonathan Christian's with us today. And he's vice president of all things, media and marketing for the tech Council. And thanks to Huntington bank for their support and belief in us for over a year, as well as our nonprofit 40 by 80. That's the wholly owned subsidiary of the tech Council. And that's our charitable arm. And you're going to hear more about some of the work that we're doing there, including apprenticeship programs. So we've muted your microphones. And we've done that on purpose. And this is an opportunity for you to just pay attention to our guests, this is not an opportunity for you to sell your wares. We have lots of opportunities for that. So let's just focus on the topic at hand, and riff off of a little bit of the song by the Grateful Dead trucking. We have Hayden cardif, he's no stranger to the tech community. He is someone that we're pretty thrilled at having conversations with, we've talked to him before, on our podcast, as well as on our radio. So we've kept close tabs to what they've been up to and how they're growing. And he's gonna he's gonna talk about what's happening. There's a lot of new news. He's gonna talk about his company, and his journey and how he became, you know, a master in trucking, which he never imagined 15 years ago, I would have I wouldn't guess I wouldn't imagine maybe when you were little you're playing with trucks. But you know, maybe now so Hayden, thank you so much for being with us today. And you know, really, before we jump in and talk about AI, delic, I really want to spend a few minutes minutes just talking about, you know, let everyone get to know you a little bit, who is Hayden and this is not your first startup, this is not your first rodeo, you've definitely been someone who has developed products and brought them to market and successfully. So we're pretty excited about some news. That's happened that's happened in terms of investment in your company. But we really want to just understand who's hating, who's hating the man and a little bit about your journey.
Audrey, thank you so much for having me. And I really appreciate this Jonathan, as well and into the tech council as a whole. So thank you so much for the introduction. very flattering, obviously. Master of trucking is something that we're still working on, but trucking nerd nonetheless. So yeah, I mean, to your point, I, you to ask me 15 years ago, if trucking would have ever been my occupation, I would have told you, you're crazy. It just was never on my radar until I had the good fortune of being able to dive into the industry. I actually helped start another company in the trucking space, called highly on and, and it was a really eye opening experience for me, I talking about who I am as a person, I'm a good old boy, I was born and raised in Kentucky. And so diving into diving into the trucking industry, I just it felt it felt at home just because of how genuine the people are, and how, how real and authentic they are. And they're just really, really good interest good professionals, you see, and that's one of the things that I admire most, especially around the truck driver is just how much of a consummate professional they are. And they love their job. They love being the backbone of the industry and backbone of our country. And being able to ship all of the things that we need on a daily basis, you start looking at some of the things that have happened just over the last year through the pandemic. I mean, when everyone in there everyone had the absolute right to feel apprehension and and you know, in need for their own safety and their own health and well being. These drivers are out there every single day, day in and day out. stripping everything that we needed to keep some semblance of normalcy going. So again, I love the industry now it is such a fantastic place to be in. So yeah, happy to be here. So
you had a company though, you had a company before this?
I did. I did, I had a couple. And you know that like the church, the traditional, you know, founder journey, it took a lot of I took a lot of lumps to get here, started another company called nebulous, which was a music and technology company. And so selling into selling to musicians and selling into the music industry is not the easiest thing to do. But hey, we were Dreamers. And we wanted to, we wanted to change the world in something that we felt excited and passionate about. So that was actually what brought me to Pittsburgh in first place. So I wanted to get my I wanted to get higher education. So I wanted to go to grad school and Carnegie Mellon had a music and technology degree program that would never let me in. But at least if I was going to find someone smart enough to be able to help me build what I had envisioned on building, I was going to find it here. So somehow somehow found my way into the Carnegie Mellon Tepper School of Business for my master's program, and, and was able to find some incredibly sharp and bright people looking at solving the same thing that I was interested in solving. And so we dove in and we took advantage of every single Pittsburgh CMU, startup, you know, startup tool on resource possible and we went through project Olympus we went through alpha lab, we went through the Swartz the Swart center, and, and you know, we got investment from innovation works, I mean, you name it, we were in it, we were trying, so we use all those resources, it was super, super just a terrific journey and a fantastic learning experience for me, because again, we made every single startup mistake you can make. And so unfortunately, had to wind it down a lot of that due to just really good technology. But we didn't have clear product vision or where who we were actually selling to or what the value prop was to them. And was it a market big enough for people to buy, you know, pretty important things to start a company. So we ended up rolling that down. And I jumped in with with a colleague there at CMU and started, you know, started highly on taking electric vehicle technology and adding it to the trailer of an 18 Wheeler for fuel savings. And so that was my first foray into the trucking industry. And it was again, like I said, it was it was fantastic, and got to know a lot of different players within the industry. One in particular got to know the team at Pitt, Ohio Express really well. And so I ended up leaving highly on but sort of working with the team at Pitt, Ohio, which is a large carrier here in Pittsburgh. And while wrapping up my MBA at CMU did some consulting work for them, where I ultimately spun out idylic from you know, from them. So it has been a long and circuitous journey. But here we are, and excited to be here.
It's great, great story. It's it's really a great point about having to love your customer ship. I mean, that's, that's that's, I love your candor on that. So let's talk about idylic what it what is I do like what's, what's the history spun it out of Pitt, Ohio? Yeah, what do you do?
Yeah, so one of the one of the things that has really been a huge boost for us in our success as a whole, it's just the fact that we are mission driven, right? Like, if you, we only have one life to live, and we obviously spend a lot of that time working. So you might as well enjoy what you do and have an impact on the world. And that's what we do here at adeleke. We help drivers come home safe each and every night. And that's not just drivers and trucking fleets that we work with, but also you and I are families, everyone that shares the road with them. And so one of the biggest issues that these fleets face is the fact that they are rolling down the highways with pieces of equipment that can be very dangerous, if operated, not operating correctly. And again, these drivers are fantastic professionals, and so they bear such a strong burden. So there's a lot of data and insights that helps these fleets understand the performance of these drivers. But the data is in disparate systems. It's not pulled together, it doesn't help them be proactive or predictive in any way. Also, the drivers can oftentimes feel disengaged. There's You know, there's a huge amount of turnover in the industry, on average about 90% each and every year across the industry. So yeah, imagine you're in town, turning over every single year. Like that implication on operations that implication on stage. And risk is huge. And so what we do at idylic is provide a driver management platform, a software solution for these fleets to tie in all the systems together, we leverage machine learning and AI to help understand driver risk. And then ultimately allow the fleets to do something about that allow them to assign corrective action and coaching, to engage with their drivers in a more meaningful way to really humanize the data and really provide a much more personal connection with those drivers. So that we can help shape the the career path for those, again, consummate professionals. So those are all huge benefits that we provided around accident reduction, claims reduction, insurance, reduction, and even driver turnover reduction. So that in a nutshell, is ultimate.
So what did you see during the pandemic? Were there any things that you saw? I mean, obviously, supply chain?
Right, yeah.
But yeah, well, that's what you've seen that you could share.
Yeah, it's a mixed bag. It's all over the place. Because we had some fleets that we, you know, customers or prospects that we were calling into, that were, again, hit really hard by who they were ultimately supplying you talking about the auto industry, you talk about restaurant industry, oil and gas industry. And we had we had fleets that we were talking to that were really excited about what we were doing, but then the oil prices just tanked. So it's like we were furloughing all of our drivers. We can't do anything right now. So come back to us in you know, a year right. So I mean, those that was one side of the extreme. And the other side, we had we had fleets who were just absolutely running with their hair on fire, because they've had so much demand that they just they couldn't stop and take a take a breath. I mean, it was it was fancy, like, we've got some really, really good the team over at Frito Lay is fantastic. I got to give a shout out to Mari Robertson and her whole team. And you know, just talking with her on on kind of what happened throughout the pandemic was was really amazing to see just there, you know, obviously with Frito Lay the summertime, especially around Fourth of July is a huge time for them. That's their biggest that's the biggest kind of sales. But and they have weeks on weeks to prep for that. They they were hitting record numbers in April. And may that record numbers that they've never seen before with no prep time. And they had to make it happen. Right like, and that's the beauty of this industry is is you've got just creativity ingenuity across the board of being able to keep things in, you know, keep stores stocked with no prep time. And so we saw a lot of that variability someplace just running way, way too much some fleets having to kind of figure out how to keep drivers even on the road. And and so it was it was it was definitely a challenging time for the industry. But again, that's one of the beautiful things about trucking and logistics is it's incredibly resilient. It is again, the backbone of our economy. And so no matter what happens, they're running. They have to, for us, for our sakes, they've got to run. And so there's obviously a lot of nuance and change in there. But I think the the the optimism around the recovery and optimism around consumer spending is definitely turned to the positive. We've had several months of really high rates, really high growth, really high spending in trucking as far as new equipment and trailer sales and things like that all good indicators of positive momentum for the economy as a whole.
So it's interesting, because I mean, Jonathan, I can tell you this whole thing about having conversations with people about paper products and toilet true toilet products, and etc. We i don't i don't recall anyone talking about the influx of demand for Frito products. But I guess, yeah, but I guess you're right, comfort food, right? carbs, people are home. And you know, well, what exactly pact has had, like in terms of the Suez Canal? And you know, some of the issues around offshoring. Do you have any, any views on all that?
Yeah, I mean, obviously, global supply chain is is heavily interconnected. And but again, one of the things I'll say is, the logistics industry is so big and is so heavily relied upon from the world, that it's their job to figure it out. Right, like, obviously, that's going to put delays on certain products, especially coming from Europe and things like that, like it is the industry is so resilient, that they figure ways to keep things in At least as much as possible running normally. And so what we found is yes, there are backups in certain ports in certain areas for certain things. But I think on the whole things have been running fairly smoothly, especially in the United States. Across the board, which is, which is obviously good to see.
Yeah, I mean, I'm optimistic I'm bullish on the United States in terms of you know, what this industry that you're in that I think people are just public companies are talking at the board level, what is going on in terms of supply chain? So you have here we have some questions, Jonathan?
Yeah, some good ones here from want to know, first thought, how's a guy like you, who's you live in the entrepreneurial life? How have you benefited from having a traditional MBA?
Yeah. So I mean, obviously, one of the things that that is really critical is the network and connection like CMU is phenomenal, I cannot say enough good things about it. Just from what so I went to a small undergrad down in South Louisiana. So down the bye You and I went there to play football I loved it had a great time. But my my view of the world was very myopic, in what my own abilities would be able to provide the what the world had to offer, coming to a place like current email and coming to a place like Pittsburgh as a whole, with the the racial diversity and all of the things that that make it such a special place. It I mean, just incredibly open ended open my eyes, it was a very, it was a very enlightening experience to kind of go through that. And one just to see like the world of possibilities open up, but to see the network's and the connections that I can make. And the impact that I could have on some of those different realms was really was really important to me in my personal development and growth. So that was one of the big benefits, again, like has nothing to do with like actual classroom itself, but again, a huge benefit of going to program like, like MBA, Tepper School of Business. But as far as like the education side of things, it was, absolutely, it was absolutely critical in how it helped me think, critically, it helped me think through and tie in how everything is interconnected. And when it comes to marketing, and sales and product and engineering, and customer success, and business development strategy, like all those things have to work together and coalesce into a cohesive strategy. But also like one of the things that I really appreciate it one of the things that I really appreciate about Carnegie Mellon Sports Center, like, like all those different pieces, like they've helped, they've helped me understand both from a firsthand experience and otherwise, that you're going to get your butt kicked a lot, trying to start a company, and you have to be resilient, you have to you have to think quickly, you have to be incredibly humbled to the to the aspect of, you've got to be able to pivot like and know when an idea or your company as a whole is not working. And you've got to be able to jump and pivot and move and adapt, to be able to find the thing that does resonate and find the thing that does work. And, and so that was that was definitely huge piece. And obviously like the educational side of it, understanding and learning a base layer across all those different disciplines is huge. But I think the biggest thing is just like being surrounded by excellence, like you get in those kind of talk to your programs, just from the staff, the the classmates, like just that general understanding, like, we're all going to go off and do something amazing, like that level of like push definitely helped again, broaden the horizons. Very cool.
So what are your thoughts on the company's like low commission that are new automating new trucking, and the impact of like electric vehicles and so forth? How's that going to kind of change the industry moving
forward? Both of both of those things, electric vehicles, and also automation are both already changing the industry for the better. And we're huge fans of that. I know, early on, when we were going through a lot of our, you know, investment rounds and pitches to VCs and things like that, we got a lot of questions and skepticism around. Well, if you're making you know, your driver management platform, what happens when there's no drivers in the truck? It's like, Alright, well, like in 20 or 30 years. Sure will like that, you know, we'll talk about some of those different things. But I think one of the one of the things that we often see though is there is a movement towards automation. There's a movement forward towards autonomous is going to take a while just like we saw in the in the airline industry. But even right now today, we still have pilots in those planes for 95% of what happens in that plane. It is on autopilot. But the flight the pilot is still there even today for takeoff and landing the same thing is going to ultimately happen for for trucking first mile last mile deliveries, those things are very, very challenging problems to solve. So you're going to need someone in that truck. Even if you do ultimately solve the problem you need someone there for exception management. When With that being said, there is a movement towards autonomy with class two, three and four levels of technology, your lane departure assist your cruise adaptive cruise control, roll stability, those types of things, very much autonomous technology. So I delic were excited to be able to help facilitate that movement towards towards that type of technology, because the big issues with the industry right now are carried in fleets themselves don't fully know and understand how to really underwrite towards the ROI of that, right, like who's still relatively unproven as far as what the actual benefits are going to come from that. So like, if I'm making the the, the spend and effort towards maintaining those types of technologies on my truck, what is the ROI gonna get still not as concrete as the industry would like, and also from an insurance perspective, how the insurance carriers actually underwrite towards the claims or underwrite toward the price of the programs that they're putting forth with that type of technology. So I felt like we're excited to be able to help facilitate both of those. Understand what CIT, because we understand what safe drivers and safely look like today, we can understand what the impact of those technologies looks like within the fleet's. Same thing with helping to underwrite the impact of that from an insurance perspective as well. So obviously, we're excited to be able to help facilitate that transition over the next several decades.
Actually, we do a really good question here from Ingrid cook. If you'd listened to our podcast, which makes me excited when we talked about the $20 million raise you guys had recently talked about? You mentioned technology to help you drive down operating expenses in combined ratios for insurers. Can you share more on this in the underwriters now use driver safety score if you price commercial insurance?
As an Ingrid, good to see you again. Thanks for Thanks for the question. So, yes, I mean, that's commercial auto is, is struggling as a whole. So I mean, you start to look at some of the data. I mean, 2019 is when we have like the most holistic, most recent year, they were $4 billion in losses as an industry. And that's just in the US alone, they were offering a 118 combined ratio. And what that means is for every dollar of premiums, the insurance carriers getting in from their, from their customers, they're paying out $1.18 and costs and claims. So it is not a winning combination. And and it's not it's not tenable, right, like there's there are a few, there are a few insurance carriers that are under that one in that 9495 ratio, which is which is good, but the vast majority are not. And so with that being the case, they're looking for ways to better understand driver risk fleet risk, and be able to better underwrite towards that, and especially in the commercial side, the issue that they're running up against today is the fact that you have these large runaway nucular vertix that are just ballooning costs. And the issue is not whether the driver was at fault or not. But whether that fleet did everything they needed to do to be fully compliant both with government regulations, but also with their own handbook and safety practice and protocols. Like if there's any type of any type of, you know, tee, not crossed eye not dotted, the plaintiffs attorneys now are able to put the fleet on trial and say you need to punish this fleet. Because even though this driver wasn't fault, the next one will be because they have systematic issues. You need to punish them, send them a lesson, you know, teach them a lesson. And that's just absolutely blowing up these different costs for the carriers and also the fleets themselves. And so one of the things that traditional underwriting doesn't take into account is the fleet's safety program, the fleet's compliance program, and we have all that information, both from a granular level driver, a telematics or camera events, the moving violations or citations, accidents, claims, injuries, work comp, customer complaints, driver demographics, like everything. So we have all that granule level driver information, but also when you start to go into how fleets use our product that starts to go into that overarching safety culture. And that's another thing, you know, are they managing their training consistently? Are they managing their escalation process consistently, like those things that would give them a higher risk for me to the vertix are inside of our program and we can then help underwrite based off of that. So that's definitely the trajectory that we're moving towards.
So,
you know, I
do want to talk about this current raise that, that you have, if you can, you can talk about, you know, your investors and what it means what it really means for you where you see yourself as a result of this cash infusion.
Absolutely. So we are incredibly fortunate, and I cannot talk about this raise without giving a just a huge shout out to our team, for all of their tireless effort and work in getting us here are terrific customers who have been with us at every turn the good and the bad, along the way, kind of, you know, going through the the bumps of startup life, but also, you know, our board and our current investor group has been phenomenal. birch, Mir ventures and Shawn Sebastian, were the first people to believe in us believe in our mission. You know, Shawn is still on the board. And he's, he's been fantastic and a great asset to Pittsburgh as a whole. But also, you know, TDF ventures, origin ventures, you know, SAS and M 25. They've all been really good, helpful. guy, you know, guidance is along the way. But this round is definitely taken us to another level. And we have to rise to that occasion, which is exciting. Because we're now at a different tier group. You know, we did bring on $20 million, which is obviously exciting from a cash infusion standpoint. But one of the things that I'm most excited for is the fact that we brought on terrific partners. So we brought on Highland capital, partners who out of Boston, just a terrific firm, you know, three decades worth of experience, and Craig Driscoll is going to join the board. And he's absolutely phenomenal. I, you know, he constantly talks about surrounding us with excellence, and just the hiring and the talent level that we need to continue to infuse inside of the company, to continue to again, be able to achieve and reach those next levels of success. And so obviously, we are hiring, we're very excited to hire in a lot of different areas. When you talk about product and engineering, customer success, data science, sales and marketing, and it's across the entire board, we've got open position. So please, if you're interested, come on board, we're doing life changing things, we'd love to have you. But also, this round is really going to allow us to continue to execute on the plan. And the plan is obviously core growth, more drivers, you know, operating safely out on the roads, more customers and fleets under our purview to be able to help them reduce injuries, reduce claims, reduce accidents, driver turnover, all those different things. But also, we talked about insurance, because not only do we bring Highland capital into the into the round, we also brought AXA Venture Partners into the round AXA being a large insurance company out of France, they have a venture capital arm here in the States. And we are elated to have them on board just because of one many issues, the one that we've been working the part of we're working with CMU grad, so with that Pittsburgh, as well, but also just their understanding of, obviously the insurance industry, but also their work with past portfolio companies and doing exactly what we want to do, which is help insurance carriers leverage the data that we have that our customers have to better underwrite, and price that risk for the benefit of those fleets. Right. Like the issue is good fleets get worse rates because of bad operating companies. So we want to write that write that wrong. And then obviously, that, you know, taking that a step further, actually being the underwriting engine for the commercial auto industry to be able to license out those types of models, since we have that data to again, better underwriting price that risk. So that is, I mean, a game changer for the industry, because they don't have anything remotely in that vein, and they're in their suffering because of it. So obviously very excited about that in the trajectory of what this round is going to allow us to do.
That's great. So we have been staying close to you over the last couple of years. And we're excited not just for you know, idyllic but for you as well, that with the juice that you bring to all of this and the passion and that you're building it here with with the with the hope of making you know the world a little bit better. And I think that they're exciting times. So hopefully you've been vaccinated, and that you're getting out into the world. And I hope that we see you in six months, I would say six months I'd like to come back and just say what do you say nothin and do like a litmus test and check in what you're up to, to see how the community can be connected to you, there's lots of people that probably want to partner with you and have some ideas in terms of creating, you know, additive opportunities. We'll be wearing our Grateful Dead shirts, and we're really, you know, happy about trucking. But honestly, Hayden, you've, you've been a real mentor to the community that are comments in here about you being a great mentor over the sports center. So it looks like you give back as well as what you pull in.
I appreciate that. And Sonia and Dave, were waiting on the whole team over the Sports Center is absolutely fantastic. If you're interested in entrepreneurship, you have ties to CMU, please go check them out there. They are just fantastic individuals, but also, just wise, wise people as far as helping you get, you get not only business off the ground, we continue to navigate all the landscape that comes forward. But we've been so fortunate here in Pittsburgh here with all the resources that we've been able to have. You know, we can't we can't not give back. And I know Nick Bartell is also a sports sports Bella seameo long. He is another one that gives liberally of his time. And so I, you know, I got to give him a good shout out as well, because I wouldn't be here without him. And Andrew Russell, another co founder and CMU alum as well. But yeah, you know, we love the we love the support that we get from the tech council from Pittsburgh as a whole, obviously, a terrific place to have a company to recruit and have just terrific talent come in. So we love it where, you know, we're,
we're neighbors, obviously, okay, our neighbors on the north side. Yeah. Like you just accepted an award from the Academy.
I mean, it feels it feels like an award, because startups, startups are an inherently risky business. You know, knowing knowing the the failure rates that happened just just
because
it is not like you have to have so much tenacity and an idea and just great people and everything has to happen correctly. Plus, you have to get lucky with market dynamics and customers and the right value the right partners along the way. There's so many things that goes into it. So for us to have gotten to this point, there are just way too many people think because it's it. It's not just myself. It's not just our founding team. There's it really took a lot to get here. And we're very appreciative for all the help.
Well, Hayden, thank you so much for joining us. I'm going to do a six month check in I'll put that on my calendar. Will see you before that, I'm sure but it'd be nice to see what this infusion of capital and trust has done for you and your company. So thank you for taking the time today. Jonathan, what do we have on board what's coming up tomorrow?
We have the mayor of New Castle Chris briars dog bites, got a really interesting background in social work and see him kind of take some civic leadership by becoming mayor's can be a really cool conversation. That's great.
Well, thank you. Thank you all haven stay safe. Thanks, everyone. We'll see you tomorrow.
Bye, Chuck and everybody.
Thank you much.
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