Dauber Applications is a company trying to reinvent how one part of the construction industry works: dump trucks.
Imagine you are a foreman, and you have lined up work for the next day with a team of guys you are paying $500 an hour to load trucks.
"The scariest, gut-wrenching part is to not have a truck ready at that time," says Dauber CEO Brian Jones. "Right now the way you try to solve that is you call the trucking company and beg, plead, yell and do other unpleasant things to find out where is your truck."
It's not a hypothetical for Jones who spent two decades in construction. He wants take that stress out of the equation with real-time tracking, digitization and streamlining of the process. Through Dauber's platform and app, Jones says he can keep trucks filled, which is the only time they make money.
Dauber raised 1.1 million dollars in seed funding. Jones says while the company is doing amazing things with technology, it was a simple premise that convinced investors, more than half of whom are construction companies.
"Hey this is an old industry. It hasn't changed in 50 years, still uses paper tickets and phone calls. That stinks," says Jones.
The company currently is being used by companies representing 60 trucks. He wants to grow that number to 1000 by the end of the year. And he doesn't think that is crazy. After all, according to analysts at IBISWorld, dump trucks are a 17 billion dollar industry with more than 95,000 drivers.
Dauber was the first company to enter the RealCo Accelerator program, which has since changed its name to the RealCo seed fund program. The program offers mentorship, training, and whatever else a company needs to build towards a Series A funding round.
"It's great validation for the work and effort that we put into the program," says RealCo partner Chris Saum.
Dauber entered RealCo about four months ago, and Jones says the lion's share of the money has been raised since then.
RealCo has grown to three members, Dauber, MrPresta, and FunnelAI, formerly AINGINES. Saum hopes to have a half dozen by the end of the summer.
