Some startups are born from one person with an idea and a lot of ambition. Others, such as Terminal Industries, are built when a group of industry specialists get together to fill a gap in the market.
The startup, which emerged from stealth July 20 with $17 million in funding, was formed when Austin-based venture capital firm 8VC and its partners at logistics and real estate company Prologis identified a big chunk of the supply chain that has seen little tech disruption: the shipping yard.
In shipping yards, Terminal Industries sets up cameras that use computer vision to capture a wide variety of details about the trucks that roll in. That gets translated into data that is then processed through a machine learning platform that digests it with insights that are useful in regulatory compliance and real-time asset tracking.
"You have people who have optimized trucks. You have people who have optimized the warehouse, and even people who are doing IoT tracking," said Jake Medwell, Terminal Industries co-founder and 8VC co-founder. "The yard has been this black box where you don't really have visibility into what's happening. And we saw it as a huge opportunity."
While the startup just launched, 8VC and its partners have been eyeing innovations in supply chains for years. The idea for shipping yard technologies, however, got a boost of interest when in 2021 California implemented Rule 2305, which requires warehouse owners and operators to share information about their facilities in an effort to reduce carbon emissions. That, ultimately, will create a carbon tax on truck counts starting in 2025, and warehouses can offset it with zero-carbon infrastructure, which can be tricky to calculate.
Medwell said Terminal's platform will help companies manage the new regulations, in addition to creating other efficiencies in truck movements at shipping yards outside of warehouses. He said current shipping yard technologies are a bit like a flip phone while Terminal's technology is akin to upgrading to iOS.
"We knew that regulation was coming into place about 18 months ago and started iterating on it and partnered up with Prologis and started building the team," Medwell said.
They tapped serial entrepreneur Max Constant — who previously co-founded Zenith AI, AnyVision and MacoGroup — as CEO, and Neil Robertson, a computer vision expert who co-founded Zenith AI and AnyVision with Constant, as chief technology officer.
The startup's funding round came from 8VC, Prologis Ventures and a batch of strategic investors that included RyderVentures, Lineage Logistics, NFI Ventures and several others. 8VC's portion comes from the $880 million fund the firm announced in March. It adds to a growing list of local investments that includes FloorFound, DocStation, Hearth, Zeno Technologies Inc. and Elon Musk's The Boring Company.
Terminal is part of 8VC's Build program, which hatches new companies through its network of entrepreneurs and investors. And the investor lineup is a big part of how Terminal is launching with its initial products already in place at several shipping yards.
"I think Austin is obviously a hotbed for a lot of companies being built and I think you're seeing a lot more supply chain companies being built in Austin and moving there because of its proximity to a lot of the large like logistics hubs," he said. "As Terminal becomes more successful, the footprint in Austin gets bigger and bigger."
