SOLANA BEACH – The logistics operating platform Alvys has raised $20.5 million in a Series A funding round, which CEO and founder Nick Darman said will help the Solana Beach-based company accelerate growth and enhance its product.
The round was led by TitaniumVentures, formerly Telstra Ventures, with participation from new investor Picus Capital and existing investors RTP and Bonfire.
With the company already experiencing healthy growth since its founding, Darman said the new funding will help Alvys’s next step as it transitions into a tech brand.
Founder & CEO
Alvys
Alvys provides carriers, freight brokers and hybrid operations with a one-stop tool that manages deliveries, coordinates driver schedules and performs other tasks to improve the supply chain.
“This $20 million is to attract the best engineering talent the world has to offer to build something that was never built before,” he said.
Darman launched the company in 2020 with his own investment of $12 million followed by a seed funding round of $6.3 million one year ago.
Healing Pain Points
“I built the platform because I was tired of onboarding different software companies to help my business, and none of those software companies actually helped my business,” Darman said. “In fact, they created more workflows. My employees ended up working more hours to do the same thing I was doing on spreadsheets.
“So in my opinion, technology that’s worth paying for is the one that’s helping you do things much faster, all things equal.”
Darman worked as a dispatcher for his father’s trucking business while earning a degree in economics, and in 2014 he established an asset-based brokerage firm. Frustrated with the gaps he saw in deliveries, he created his own transportation management system in 2017, which boosted his business to $100 million in revenue.
“I saw an opportunity and realized I need to spin off the technology side of the business, and that’s how Alvys was born,” he said.
Explaining the company’s name, Darman said it means acting wisely, which he saw as fitting for his mission of helping the industry crucial for keeping the country running.
“We have food on our table because of certain people in the field who are working hard, but no one is actually solving their pain points,” he said. “There’s a lot of moving parts. We need to be able to eliminate the noise from this logistics space and create a clear path for every user in order to drive efficiency, and that’s exactly what we’re doing.”
Among the many functions of the platform, users can see a driver’s hours of service in real time, send the driver a chat message, find suggested trips based on the driver’s availability and mileage from a pick-up, and then drag and drop the dispatch to the driver.
Darman said users are reporting an average load increase of 22% in just four months because the platform has made their operation more efficient.
“Operators in our space should be able to do a lot more freight with less people,” he said.
“They should be able to reduce the amount of miles yet deliver the same amount of tonnage. And all that comes through different modules of optimization, AI products, and creating efficiencies between all the departments.”
Scratching the Surface
Darman said Alvys has 700 customers, and within a month it will have 800.
There’s still a large market to conquer, however. He estimates there are about 900,000 trucking businesses of different types in the nation, but half of those are too small to make use of the Alvys app. That still leaves a potential 400,000 customers, and Darman acknowledges they are just scratching the surface with 800 customers.
“But at the same time, our competitors in the past rarely reached even 700 customers,” he said.
While building the platform, Darman said he discovered the challenge was greater than he expected.
“Having someone like myself who knows the business inside and out is not enough to build the proper technology,” he said. “What we actually needed was to have someone like myself coupled with Silicon Valley top engineers. Only then will technology be possible.”
Darman said he found who he was looking for in Leo Gorodinski, who had been an engineer at Jet.com before co-founding Alvys and taking on the position of chief technical officer.
With the new funding, Darman said the company will be seeking out more high-level engineers to help the company grow.
“We’re going after the brightest minds, the engineers that are willing to solve something that’s difficult,” he said.
Alvys
FOUNDED: 2020
CEO: Nick Darman
HEADQUARTERS: Solana Beach
BUSINESS: Logistics operating platform
FUNDING: $38.8 million
EMPLOYEES: 140
WEBSITE: https://alvys.com/
CONTACT: (619) 782-7833
NOTABLE: The company is adding about 100 customers each month.
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