Tow4Tech hooks new investor to scale roadside dispatch platform
A Florida-based startup called Tow4Tech, which developed towing dispatch software to improve fleets’ ability to find and receive tows for their downed trucks, has nearly doubled its available capital. The company said BrightCap Ventures, an early-stage venture capital firm out of Sofia, Bulgaria, has led a $1.5 million investment round. This gives Tow4Tech $3.3 million in total invested.
With this new pre-seed infusion, Tow4Tech CEO Craig Schneider said the plan is to expand the company's national network of medium- and heavy-duty towing companies signed to the platform, enhance the platform’s existing abilities, and hire more software engineers and support staff.
“It's really going to enable us to scale operations, accelerate our product development, and expand to more parts of the country,” Schneider told Fleet Maintenance.
Here’s how the platform currently works: When a fleet manager or operator needs a tow, they log into the Tow4Tech app and get a list of available towing companies in the area and their estimated time of arrival. Similar to a rideshare platform, the software geolocates available wreckers and the fleet can dispatch the preferred option. The tow driver knows exactly where to go and has all the relevant information, such as the specific maintenance issue and load status. The customer recieves updates on arrival and invoicing is instant.
Tow4Tech charges customers $99 per use but also offers fleet pricing. That money for the service is nothing compared to the cost of letting a truck linger on the side of the road while a fleet owner or dispatcher searches for available tow companies.
“We are getting multiple towing companies in under two minutes responding to the availability of a job, and we are 100% of the time dispatching and assigning the job to a tow vendor in under five minutes,” said Schneider, who asserted no other solution like this exists in the $12 billion commercial towing sector.
Schneider, who hails from the finance world, said he got the idea for the company while taking a long lunch one day in the Fort Lauderdale area. When he was driving to the business meeting, he noticed a truck broken down on the side of the road. When he was coming back two-and-half hours later, a tow truck was just arriving.
“And I'm not in the middle of nowhere; we are located in South Florida,” he stressed.
After that he did a lot of research, receiving confirmation from “a major trucking company” that a solution that speeds up the towing process would be a welcome uptime driver. That fleet is a Tow4Tech customer, though Schneider was not ready to disclose many specifics in these early stages.
He did divulge that the app’s secret sauce is the geolocation algorithm, which gives fleets several options.
“We'll see four or five companies come back with a 60 to 90-minute ETA, and then one company comes back with a six-minute ETA, because there's a truck available from their fleet one mile away, and it would take them five minutes to get there,” he explained.
Without the app, a fleet would have to get very lucky to yield the same results in a few minutes.
“The opportunity for that trucking company to actually find that vendor is a very low percentage,” Schneider said.
And all this adds up to that immobile truck getting back to work and generating revenue faster. A pilot “with a top national fleet manager” found trucks using the platform got back on the road faster.
There are plenty of other ingredients the platform can add to speed up dispatch and tow arrival times, which the new investment could make a reality. One area is likely to be providing the tower’s rates because as Schneider explained, fleets would be willing to wait a little longer if a wrecker with a longer ETA charges less than a closer one.
“Absolutely, that will be, ultimately, something that we figure in,” he said. “But that's something that, as we grow with our providers, they need to be able to input their rate sheets and such into the system.”
Tow4Tech does ensure the towing providers have the proper licensing, registration, and insurance, but ultimately the onus is on the fleet to pick the best option.
And while Tow4Tech is just starting out, it does have Europe and other global markets in its sights, as anywhere there’s a truck, there’s going to be the need for a tow. The company has set up a Romanian subsidiary, Tow4Technologies SRL, as a satellite development center and potential future base for Europe.
“Tow4Tech is redefining how roadside assistance works for commercial fleets by bringing a level of speed, transparency, and efficiency to a fragmented, manual-heavy process,” said Georgi Mitov, managing partner at BrightCap Ventures. “By replacing the outdated pen-and-paper, phone-based dispatch model with a fully digital platform, they’re creating real operational value for both fleets and tow providers.
