After leading its Series A in 2017, Notion is returning for Avrios’ Series B funding this month. Jos White explains why Avrios is such an interesting business and what other founders can learn from their progress.

Read more about the news here.

I’m always interested in a founder story where the founder is an insider to the pain and an outsider to the market.

Andi had worked for his family business, he had been responsible for managing all the various vehicles and was struck by how complicated it was.

There seemed to only be a spreadsheet to keep track of crucial details such as when a vehicle was bought, how they were being utilised, how much they were costing and when they were sold.

That led to the idea that maybe it makes sense to develop software to help a company manage all this more effectively.

Avrios helps businesses keep a digital record of one of their most valuable assets: all the cars and vehicles they manage.

But this is only the start of the story. Avrios are building a marketplace to make it much easier for those companies to buy and sell cars and all the associated services such as leasing, insurance, fuel cards and damage repair.

You will be able to have multiple vendors quote for the business and make the transaction right there on the platform.

The next stage is that Avrios can help an organisation offer a wider range of transportation services beyond just car ownership. This means thinking towards carpools, rental cars, shared cars and mobility as a service. The industry is going through a massive phase of disruption and Avrios can help companies navigate through these changes and meet the changing expectations of their workforce.

The way I look at is that Avrios is a software layer that sits between an organisation and one of its largest costs, automobile transportation. And this puts them in a highly valuable position where they can help an organization with the management, optimization and usage of this asset.

Fleet management and society

In the tech business, there’s lots of virtual working and it’s mainly based in major cities with great public transport so it’s easy to forget that this industry is a bit of an outlier.

In most industries, businesses must maintain a vehicle fleet and it’s one of the largest costs they have. If companies can manage it more effectively they will be able to define and enforce a more flexible transportation policy, leading to saved money and improved employee satisfaction.

It makes it easier to encourage the use of shared cars, electric cars and more environmentally friendly options. This is a key way for businesses to reduce their carbon footprint and improve their impact on pollution over time.

With hundreds of customers and hundreds of thousands of vehicles on the platform, Avrios is accumulating a big data set about car usage.

They can make recommendations on things like the best time to buy or lease. They can answer questions such as, ‘what’s the optimum amount of time before you should sell it on?’ or, ‘is a quote you received for damage repair competitive based on similar quotes you have seen?’

Avrios can put these things into context, deliver insights and make recommendations to get the best results.

Avrios from a Notion perspective

Avrios operates in transportation, a really interesting area for us. Yes, its existing product makes it much easier to manage vehicle fleets, but the broader vision connects to the broader changes around us such as environmental concerns, the move from ownership to sharing/ rental and the switch to electric vehicles.

In the last ten years, we have seen enormous innovation on the consumer side, which can be attributed to the smartphone platform. However, the smartphone platform is becoming fairly saturated now, while everyone waits for the next big platform

Yet, there’s still a very long tail of business processes and workflows that are being done either by outdated on-premise software or manually.

That’s a massive opportunity, especially when you combine the vast volumes of data and machine-learning, to develop a wider range of capabilities.

Avrios is a great example of this and joins a growing list of companies in our portfolio embracing this wave of change.