Hauler Hero has picked up fresh funds as demand for its AI-powered waste management software continues to pile up.
The New York-based startup raised $16 million in a Series A round led by Frontier Growth with participation from K5 Global and Somersault Ventures, among others, TechCrunch has learned. Hauler Hero has raised more than $27 million in venture capital, to date.
Hauler Hero has developed an all-in-one software platform for waste management companies that covers a variety of functions, including customer relationship management, billing, and routing. And now, like so many other software companies, Hauler Hero plans to offer AI agents to its customers as well.
Hauler Hero was co-founded in 2020 by CEO Mark Hoadley and brother-in-law Ben Sikma, who encountered outdated software while working on mergers and acquisitions in the sector. Their aim was to bring waste management into the modern era.
“All of the existing software in the space, they were clunky, old,” Hoadley told TechCrunch in 2024. “Sometimes we’d talk about how this one reminds us of the Oregon Trail, this reminds us of the cell phone Michael Douglas used in ‘Wall Street.’ They’re very clunky and antiquated.”
The numbers suggest the company has had some success; Hauler Hero said it has helped facilitate 35 million trash pickups since inception in 2020. And it continues to grow, according to Hoadley, who told TechCrunch the company has doubled its head count, revenue, and customer base since announcing its seed round in late 2024.
Hauler Hero has added new features to its platform since its seed round, Hoadley said. The most notable is a product that captures images from third-party cameras on garbage trucks and sends them directly to a software command center. This information helps waste management companies confirm pickups, verify billing, and keep a better eye on their distributed fleet, according to the company.
Hoadley said some sanitation workers, and their respective unions, don’t love this tech upgrade. But he added that most unions prevent the footage from being used against the drivers for disciplinary measures, for example, and that the images can actually help reduce liability for drivers in accidents or if they are accused of missing a pickup.
“Think of it as like running a factory with no roof and no visibility into what’s happening in that factory,” Hoadley said. “If you don’t have visibility into what’s happening out there, it’s very hard to have quality control. And the quality control in this case is what was out there, was it picked up?”
A trio of AI agents
Hauler Hero is now working to develop and deploy a set of three AI agents. One, Hero Vision, is focused on automatically identifying service issues and revenue opportunities. Hero Chat is a chatbot for customer inquiries. Hero Route will use route data to automatically adjust routes to make them more efficient.
“There’s an enormous amount of data in our system about pickups, work orders, billing information, and if you give these agents an understanding of your data model, you can just go tell them, hey, go build me a chart,” Hoadley said.
Hauler Hero plans to use some of its recent funding to commercialize these agents in addition to bulking up its offerings for municipal entities, a growing group of the company’s customers.
“It wasn’t something that I necessarily thought was going to be part of this journey,” Hoadley said about working with these public entities. “It kind of came organically as many things do. We just had inbound from some municipalities and eventually we sold one of them and then we sold another.”
Hoadley said that he thinks some of that demand is driven by the fact that its two main competitors, Routeware and Wastech, merged in 2024, leaving government entities with little choice of providers to work with.
Hoadley said the company is now focused on fine-tuning and scaling its product — and maybe some new additions as well.
“We’re going to continue to chart the course for the next decade of being at the cutting edge of delivering value for customers, leveraging all the latest tools,” Hoadley said. “There’s a lot more fun things and valuable things that we can do for our customers, and we’re really excited about it.”
This piece has been updated to better reflect which investors participated in the Series A.