As the U.S. trucking industry gears up for the negative impacts of U.S. President Donald Trump’s new tariffs on goods imported from Mexico and Canada, a startup building a new kind of trucking insurance has raised some money to grow and help truckers weather the changes.
Nirvana, an AI-based insurance platform that uses real-time driving telematics and 20 billion miles of truck driving data to build and manage insurance policies for truckers, has raised $80 million in a Series C round of funding. The fresh cash will be used to build more services for fleets and individual drivers.
The investment values Nirvana at $830 million post-money, more than double its previous valuation of $350 million in October 2023.
Rushil Goel, Nirvana’s CEO and co-founder, described the round as “pre-emptive” — it was raised following inbound interest rather than the startup needing the cash.
The investment comes from three previous backers. General Catalyst is leading the round, and Lightspeed Venture Partners and Valor Equity Partners are participating.
The investors are doubling down following decent growth at the San Francisco-based startup. Nirvana said it has premiums under management worth more than $100 million, double from last year.
This growth is coming at the nexus of a few trends.
The trucking industry is potentially an enormous market for Nirvana and others like it. Overall, the U.S. trucking industry generated revenue of more than $900 billion in 2024, and accounted for 77% of the freight market in the country, according to the American Trucking Association. It employs around 8.5. million people, 3.5 million of whom are drivers, and has some 14.3 million single-axle and combination trucks registered, which makes up about 5% of all motor vehicles in the country.
The industry grew 1.6% in 2025, and its revenue is projected to increase to $1.46 trillion by 2035.
That was, however, before Trump last month outlined his broader economic policies, specifically his push to institute import taxes on goods from Canada and Mexico to raise federal revenue and drive domestic production.
“Imposing border taxes on our two largest and most important trading partners will undo […] progress and raise costs for consumers,” the American Trucking Association said earlier this month. “The 100,000 full-time hardworking truckers hauling 85% of the surface trade in goods with Mexico and 67% of the goods traded with Canada will bear a direct and disproportionate impact.”
Not only will tariffs reduce cross-border freight, the association added, they will also increase operational costs. The price of a new truck could rise by up to $35,000, it estimated, “amounting to a $2 billion annual tax and putting new equipment out of reach for small carriers.”
All of this means trucking businesses now need to be more mindful of costs than ever before. That is where Nirvana is hoping to play a part. It’s also where Nirvana needs to play a part lest it find itself facing the same problems as its customers.
“The tariffs and related supply chain are disruptions that are certainly coming up,” Goel said in an interview. “And of course, in an industry like trucking, which drives 70% of the freight in the U.S., there’s certainly some impact of that to be expected. It’s our new reality.”
The company’s platform covers insurance both for fleets (groups of more than 10 ‘power units’) and non-fleets (1-9 units). Like other new players in insurance, it charges fees based on usage, on a “pay as you drive” basis that also incorporates safety data using telematics from the vehicles plus data logged by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, the trucking regulator.
That safety data is also part of the company’s safety analytics product. In addition to this and the underwriting tech that Nirvana claims produces quotes 15 times faster than a traditional insurer, it has also built AI tools supposedly automate and speed up claims processing.
Similar to other legacy markets like industrial technology, trucking has been a ripe area for tech startups over the last several years.
Tapping into innovations in areas like cloud computing, AI, fintech and connected vehicles, startups are spinning up new SaaS-based products to help drivers build their businesses and enable trucking companies to run their fleets more seamlessly. Other companies in the space include Lula, SmartHop, Fairmatic and CloudTrucks.
Startups are taking ambitious swings at the trucks themselves, working on electric and autonomous vehicles for the next generation of transportation.
Similarly, insurance is in the middle of an evolution. Something similar to the concept of “neobanks” that create a more dynamic user experience on top of legacy infrastructure has played out among insurance startups. They are also tapping into innovations around big data and AI to rethink how services are priced and provisioned.
General Catalyst declined to be interviewed for this story, but it’s notable that its biggest bigwig, CEO Hemant Taneja, is leading this round for the firm.
“Insurance is traditionally a technologically bereft market, ripe for change. Nirvana is proving a disruptive model, finding rich data at scale and building AI around the complex steps of providing commercial insurance from quote through claims,” Taneja said in a statement. “We’ve been excited to be a partner in their incredible results, and this investment will accelerate Nirvana even further.”
