Meet the insurtech: Nirvana Insurance

Nirvana Insurance was founded in early 2021 “to bring the trucking industry up to speed with the rest of the world” in terms of insurance, says Rushil Goel, CEO and co-founder of the company.

The company announced the launch of its first offering, a telematics-based platform that is designed to modernize commercial fleet insurance by using vast amounts of driving data gathered from sensors on trucks in February. The goal is to make roads safer and aid the imperiled trucking industry, according to Nirvana.

Commercial fleet insurance has drastically changed since the 2017 U.S. federal government mandate requiring trucks to install electronic logging devices, including sensors to track everything from hard braking to speed acceleration, Goel says.

“That said, insurers were not rewarding safe drivers but only raising the fleet's overall rate,” Goel says. “Rather than ignoring the billions of data points this system offers, Nirvana utilizes them through its machine learning AI to mitigate risk and reward its safest fleets.”

The company is using telematics data to transform what it calls the “stubbornly analog” world of truck insurance to help fleets mitigate risk, improve driver performance, decrease costs and make the insurance process easier for everyone. This is especially important today, the company says, as the world experiences a global supply chain crunch that’s made worse by a trucking industry under duress.

More than 90% of the fleets nationwide have fewer than 50 trucks, and these small businesses operate on razor-thin margins, the company notes.

The policies Nirvana offers are usage-based and quotes are directly based on the location, speed, weather, traffic patterns, AI-powered dashboard cameras, and the driving performance of individual drivers, Goel says.

The platform connects billions of data points from telematics, as well as from public sources such as various Departments of Motor Vehicles and the U.S. Department of Transportation, to provide instantaneous quotes.

The process Nirvana uses “ensures rates are tailored to fleets' actual risk on the roads while meeting the tight margins the trucking industry faces,” Goel says. “Fleets pay for how much they drive, supporting the focus on reducing costs and tailoring coverage to a fleets’ actual exposure and usage.”

Because ELD sensors are already installed in most trucks, deployment of the Nirvana technology can be easy, Goel says. The company has seen “tremendous demand” from customers and agency partners such as USI, HUB, Truck Writers and Transtar.

The cost to insure a single truck in a fleet is about $15,000 per year, Goel says. Nirvana also provides recommendations on routes for drivers to take and specific coaching for individual drivers to bring prices down.

With the rise of the Internet of Things in many operations including transportation, warehouses and factories, data points can be accessed across the board to help businesses become safer and more efficient, Goel says. The rapid growth of IoT and the related technology Nirvana offers has helped get the company off the ground quickly.

“Being early adopters of IoT has enabled Nirvana to bridge the gap between operation industries, to promote a safer nationwide supply chain,” Goel says. “Today’s fleet system is overwhelmingly analog, with fleets forced to navigate the complicated world of agents and underwriters, and often taking 30-plus days to even get a quote.”

This throttles competition and creates hurdles for an already compressed system,” Goel says. “We are trying to revolutionize the way trucking fleets are insured,” he adds. “With the dual challenges of the global supply chain and employee crises, truck fleet operators have been shouldering extra costs. Nirvana is a new-world solution to those issues, positively impacting fleets and their drivers where they need it most. The process does not have to be confusing or at a high financial cost.”

Nirvana recently closed a $22 million Series A funding round, bringing the total raised to more than $25 million. The round was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners with additional participation from General Catalyst and others.

“We are considered one of the fastest-growing insurtech companies ever to launch, and we will use the new funding to scale operations, grow the team, and invest in [research and development] efforts to expand products and services,” Goel says.