David Hodge founded Standard Fleet a couple of years ago to help businesses manage their fleets of electric vehicles, but the startup's origins actually go back a bit further.
Hodge started building an app for Tesla car owners in 2018 and called it the Nikola app, in a nod to the scientist for whom the electric car company is also named.
The app allowed individual car owners to remotely monitor and manage their cars beyond what Tesla offered itself, but unexpectedly, businesses also started showing an interest in getting features that were more tailored to their needs.
Then in 2021, Hodge reincorporated the company from a limited liability corporation known as Nikola Software to a C-corporation and renamed it as Standard Fleet.
The Nikola app is still available for iPhone users, but the changes reflected a pivot toward enterprise customers.
Standard Fleet is now close to having 100,000 electric vehicles that are managed with its software, Hodge told me.
And on Wednesday, the San Francisco company announced that it had raised $7 million in seed funding from Pierre Omidyar's venture firm UP2398 and Canvas Ventures.
"We feel lucky to be onto something and riding this mega trend of electrification because that has allowed us to get this funding and to focus in a time when I think many other founders with great businesses and great ideas are struggling," Hodge said. "We're grateful to be working on something that we care about because we think electrification of fleets is really essential to transition to sustainable energy, and also to be working on something that is economically viable at this time."
The company charges a monthly $15 subscription fee per vehicle on its standard plan and also offers customized pricing for enterprise customers.
Its features include things like location tracking, battery monitoring, charging cost management, remote vehicle access and maintenance alerts.
"What we do is much more complex than it seems," Hodge said. "You have to be able to pull data from the cars and do it in such a way that you're not draining the battery of those vehicles, and that's easier said than done. Our experience with Nikola, our experience with these fleets with all of these cars, has helped us there."
Prior to both the Nikola app and Standard Fleet, Hodge co-founded another transportation-related company called Embark Inc., which developed mobile apps that helped users navigate on public transportation. Apple acquired Embark in 2013 for an undisclosed price, the WSJ reported at the time.
Hodge then worked for Apple for a few years as an engineering manager and helped the Cupertino tech giant build out its transit features in its proprietary Maps app.
Standard Fleet currently has seven employees, including two of Hodge's former Embark co-founders: Taylor Malloy, an engineer, and Ian Leighton, who oversees design.
The team will stay relatively lean, Hodge told me, but they're anticipating "significant customer growth" as more enterprises electrify their vehicles.
"With my last company, we were profitable and we came of age in an era when capital was more scarce, which is kind of what it's like now," Hodge said. "We're trying to be very thoughtful with the capital that we have."
And while the startup is focused on fleets of passenger cars at the moment, the company will continue to build out capabilities for more types of vehicles from different manufacturers and for different industries, Hodge told me.
Globally, the market for fleet management services exceeded $19 billion in 2020 and is expected to more than double to around $52 billion by 2023, according to Allied Market Research. That includes light and heavy vehicles, as well as aircraft, railways and watercraft.
Major competitors in the fleet management industry include AT&T, Cisco, IBM, Verizon and TomTom International, as well as Freeway Fleet Systems, Geotab, I.D. Systems, MiTAC Holdings Corporation and Navico, according to Allied Market Research.
San Francisco-based Samsara also provides operations and fleet management services. It debuted on the New York Stock Exchange at the end of 2021.
