RueData has closed a seed financing round to continue serving over 40,000 vehicles, with plans to use the investment to accelerate adoption of its tire management platform, scale operations and continue innovating its AI-driven fleet optimization solutions for trucking fleets. The round was led by Valor Ventures with participation from Decelera Ventures, Idea Foundry and industry angel investors.
For RueData founder and CEO Sebastian Baquero, the funding, announced Thursday at SXSW in Austin, Texas, is the next step in a journey that began long before RueData was founded in 2018. Baquero’s career in the trucking industry started with importing and selling tires at just 21 years old. Through years of experience working directly with fleets, he gained firsthand insight into one of the industry’s most overlooked cost centers.
After fuel, tires are fleets’ biggest expense, “yet they’re often treated as an inventory problem rather than an optimization challenge,” Baquero explained to FreightWaves. “We realized that with the right technology, we could predict and prevent unnecessary tire wear, reduce blowouts and save fleets substantial costs.”
This realization led Baquero to pivot from tire sales to developing a software solution. RueData’s platform centralizes tire data, factors in variables like vehicle type, cargo weight, routes and weather conditions, and provides fleet operators with customized maintenance recommendations.