For four generations the Bretthauer family have been in the fuel business. Now, brother and sister Kevin and Alex Bretthauer are bringing the business into the next generation with a digital arm designed to keep the company relevant to current customers and for future energy needs as well.
The duo founded FuelCloud in 2015, a separate business from the family’s legacy Bretthauer Oil Co., a fuel distributor. With FuelCloud they created a hardware and software platform that helps customers who own fueling tanks to better manage their inventory and track usage.
The company developed a piece of hardware that easily connects to a pump on a fuel tank. That hardware is tied to cloud-based software that is accessed through an app. Drivers of vehicles open the app authorize a transaction and the fuel dispensed is recorded. The company that owns the tank can then access the information to track fuel usage and even vehicle use and health.
The system also has a kiosk that can be set up at the pump to access the software because “there is always still some guy with a flip phone,” said Kevin Bretthauer, who is vice president of sales of FuelCloud.
“On the backend, we track all the gallons and where it goes,” he said, noting it can locate spills or even theft. For businesses that receive tax incentives or other benefits it can track those uses as well, he added. The software integrates with other industry workflows.
Kevin describes the start of the company as a “slow burn” for the first two years after sales started in 2016 before really taking off. It now has team of roughly 40 people and about $5 million in revenue. The company monitors 6,000 tanks with more than 3,100 customers in 19 countries and in all 50 states.
Customers are those with fleet vehicles or their own fueling stations. This is everything from mom-and-pop landscaping companies to a Fortune 500 logistics company that delivers packages to homes, Kevin said.
How FuelCloud got started
Alex and Kevin worked in the family business. It was there Kevin, who is 3-and-half years older than Alex, initially hatched the idea.
He saw customers that had no idea where the fuel they were dispensing was going. Some customers had codes to type into pumps but of the use was more of an honor system with employees filling vehicles.
“If the tank is a bank you would not allow people to do an honor system. Especially when gas is $6 a gallon,” said Kevin.
Kevin studied at Stanford and was around the entrepreneurial and business ecosystem of the Silicon Valley. Alex Brettauer studied at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. She was able to bring Kevin’s idea to an electrical engineering friend who jumped on board to build the first product.
Alex said that between the worlds of Stanford and SMU each of the siblings has a piece of the industry covered: the tech component and the fuel market.
“The money (in energy) is in drilling and fracking,” said Alex, who is president of the company, on why the opportunity existed in the market for FuelCloud. “People don’t innovate downstream. They don’t think of the municipalities or the fleets that need to be tracked.”
People in the industry who understand the pump component don’t necessarily understand how to make software, she added.
FuelCloud got launched with investment from friends and family and a small strategic round from an early customer. Since it started selling product it has been self-funded.
What's next for FuelCloud
The siblings said they could have raised more money and grown faster, but they have another priority: keeping the business in their hands.
They have seen what happens when you can keep control. Their great grandfather started the initial family business in 1928.
“We want to grow fast, but naturally and hold this business in our family,” said Alex.
Kevin adds that introducing venture capital can bring growth for growth's sake and not based on product. “It’s important for us to be product-driven first,” he said. “We want to solve a problem.”
And for FuelCloud that means solving problems for tracking energy in all its forms.
“When fuel is expensive it’s boom time for us. People don’t think about fuel costs when it’s cheap,” Kevin said. “Now people need to know everything.”
In addition to making all the software in-house, the company works with manufacturers in Corvallis and Hillsboro to make its hardware. The siblings said they are proud to keep everything local.
The focus right now is on fossil fuels but the team is already working on integrating more fuel mixes into the product.
The company is betting that the mix of fuels for fleets will change and it will no longer be strictly gas and diesel but will include propane auto gas or hydrogen and electric vehicles.
“Fleet manager could see five different fuels and need to manage and get all that data,” said Kevin. “From our standpoint we build the technology to track that efficiently.”
Closer look
Company: FuelCloud
What it does: Cloud-based fuel management system
Based: Hillsboro
Founders: Siblings Alex and Kevin Bretthauer
Employees: 40
Revenue: $5 million
Web: fuelcloud.com
