Revolutionizing Trucking Payments A Conversation with AtoB’s Vignan Velivel

Episode Overview

Vignan Velivela is the CEO and co-founder of A tB, a company that is modernizing the trucking and transportation sectors by addressing the outdated financial systems that have long hindered efficiency. Originally from India, Vignan earned his bachelor’s degree in electronic engineering and economics before moving to the United States to further his education at Carnegie Mellon University, where he focused on autonomous vehicle systems. His experience in both engineering and fintech has made him a leading voice in the logistics industry, particularly in the application of advanced payment systems. Before A to B, Vignan worked at Cruise Automation, a General Motors subsidiary specializing in self-driving car technology, where he helped develop autonomous driving solutions that are now deployed in multiple U.S. cities.

In 2019, Vignan founded AtoB to tackle the critical issue of delayed payments within the trucking industry. Truck drivers and fleet operators frequently wait weeks for payments, which creates financial instability and inefficiency in a sector that is vital to the global economy. Under Vignan’s leadership, A to B has introduced a same-day payment model, along with fraud prevention tools and fuel reward programs that reduce costs for fleet operators. A to B’s solutions have not only modernized the payment process but also offer data-driven insights, helping companies make more informed decisions and optimize operational efficiency. Vignan’s approach leverages his background in both advanced technology and payment systems to create a comprehensive solution for the trucking industry.

Vignan’s passion for technology and innovation extends beyond trucking. During his time at Carnegie Mellon, he contributed to NASA’s lunar rover project, an experience that deepened his appreciation for solving large-scale technical challenges. His work in the automotive and aerospace industries has shaped his vision for AtoB, where he aims to build a sustainable and efficient ecosystem for logistics. Vignan believes in using technology to empower small businesses, especially those in underserved areas, by providing tools that allow them to thrive in a rapidly changing economy.

Episode Transcript

 Kevin Rosenqvist: Hey, welcome to Pay Pod, where we bring you conversations with the trailblazers shaping the future of payments and fintech. My name is Kevin Rosenqvist and thanks for listening. Everything you own, everything you’ve ever owned. Share one thing in common they got to you because of the trucking and transportation industries. What’s surprising is that the trucking and transportation industry uses what might be the most archaic payments and financial systems out there, relying heavily on systems created as far back as the 1980s. Today I’m chatting with Vignan Velivela. He’s the CEO and co-founder of AtoB. They’re working to modernize the trucking and transportation industry by creating a payment system that allowed delivery companies, as well as the drivers, to get paid immediately, rather than waiting two weeks for a paper check. They even have fuel, rewards, and ways to prevent fraud as well. Vignan  and I chat about the challenges of modernizing such a vast and outdated system, his work with NASA on the lunar rover, and how close we are to seeing autonomous semis on the road. So please welcome Vignan Velivela. So you’re from India originally, and you got your bachelor’s there in electronic engineering and economics. Then you came to the States and spent a year at Carnegie Mellon University. So. So what brought you to the US?

Vignan Velivela: The short answer is cars and transportation. And the longer answer is AI. So I grew up in India and engineer by training and studied economics also at college. And I started a payments company in India. And when that company got eventually got exit and, you know, I was thinking about what’s my next chapter, I fondly remember my college days when I was working on electric mobility and grid scale storage, and these were topics I was actively like learning about. And, you know, we are in 2024 today. And,  it feels so obvious to study electric vehicles when you are, you know, studying doubly as a major. But roughly ten, 12 years ago, when I was in my final year of college, I was surprised by how much resistance my department had to even think this would be a major topic. And this is, you know, a developing country like India where cars are already a luxury. So electric cars, by definition, are a rare thing for most people to afford, if at all. And I think if you go by first principles, the reality is that electric vehicles are the most efficient form of transportation, especially if you are looking at a car or a mobility service.

Vignan Velivela: And, when I transitioned to the US, one of the things I wanted to study was both electric vehicles and autonomous driving systems. So self-driving cars. And so Carnegie Mellon was one of the more prominent schools that was in this space for decades at that point. And so I had a ton of fun learning from some of the best in that space. And,  you know, working weekday’s weeknights, as you know, folks in the startup world do just like learning as much as I can about all the fundamental driving systems. And that also got me into my first job out of grad school, which was at a company called Cruise Automation, which is a General Motors subsidiary. At this point, they were a startup at one point. And,  they do self-driving cars primarily in the San Francisco Bay area and also other cities like Phoenix, Arizona. And,  yeah, that’s my quick background on how I got into transportation.

 Kevin Rosenqvist: But what was your company in India? The first one you founded was called Praj alone.  what was the motivation for starting that? And what was the area of focus for Praj alone?

Vignan Velivela: So India has this interesting problem of people having more smartphones than they have bank accounts. Okay. And that’s an interesting dichotomy because,  what has effectively happened is the banking industry was primarily built on like a retail storefront equivalent system where you have to have a physical branch to open a bank account. And people, especially the urban poor and primarily most of the rural population in India, did not have such access. And so smartphones, on the other hand, effectively leapfrog that entire problem by effectively becoming very cheap. And, you know, it’s smartphone is now available for like $1,020 today. Android phone. So Android kind of democratized access to technology and that. So we were trying to see if we can build if we can democratize access to financial services on top of it. And and so praja in Sanskrit means people. And the reality is that India actually has a fairly modern payments system. So for example, if you are an individual and you want to pay for your rent every month, or if you want to pay for your bills every month, you just can transfer money from your bank account through a system called UPI. And it’s a 24 over seven system that runs intra bank. So you don’t really need a card network, or you don’t need this expensive wire transfer fees to make any payments. And so it’s almost a it would be like a very hard to sell service if you are charging for payments in India. It’s almost like charging for things which are we consider for free, like for example, the air we breathe or the water we drink. So it’s almost as common. Like so. Payments are truly ubiquitous in India and are partly digital. Phones like smartphones have made that happen. So we were basically trying to build the financial services layer on top, particularly access to capital like small business loans. And also microfinance for individuals. And that was a broader theme.

 Kevin Rosenqvist: Very cool, very cool. And then I want to talk about this. I know we’re going to get to AtoB in a second here. But as a wannabe space nerd myself, I got to ask you about the lunar rover that you, you were helping to develop with NASA. That is cool. Like, how can you tell me a little about that?

Vignan Velivela: So happy too. So Carnegie Mellon is known primarily for the robotics department and programs around both planetary rovers and self-driving cars. So our research center is called the Field Robotics Center. And,  there were some other OG developers of the first few generations of self-driving cars as early as the 1980s. So in fact, there are like these golf carts,  in the CMU basement, which have like all these, like, very legacy systems running them. But, you know, they work in the CMU basement. I kid you not. Like, so the CMU basement is a treasure trove for anyone who is studying technology history, because there’s almost like the entire collection that you can imagine from the 70s and 80s all the way to the 2020s. And,  yeah. So my lab was primarily the place where some of the founders of companies like Waymo or Argo, Aurora and many other pivotal self-driving car companies effectively grew out of a single lab in CMU. That’s how small the self-driving world is to some extent. This was an interesting project I got to start with in grad school, which was,  so NASA had this vision to Into have tube rovers, and these are the effective equivalent of CubeSats or satellites. And in the satellite world, there’s been a major transition from building these really massive school bus sized satellites that cost $1 billion or more, takes 5 to 10 years of development, and it has been transitioned to a CubeSat model. So especially if you’re looking at satellites that Starlink has built recently, Planet Labs has built five years ago for Earth imaging.

Vignan Velivela: All these are satellites that are in a significantly smaller form factor. So they’re probably the size of a, you know, a laptop or a computer rack, but not the size of a school bus. That’s the earlier generation of satellites. So the equivalent of that is still to be built for planetary exploration. So I’m quite fond of exploration as a pursuit. And whether it is the exploration of seas or new frontiers like space, one of the challenges for doing space exploration in a cheaper manner is that the way Mars rovers are developed today takes like 5 to 10 years, plus planning and development cycles and like billions of dollars of development cost. What if that can be flipped and you can build a far smaller and in some senses weaker version of the same rover, but have like thousands of them, exploring large parts of the lunar surface and in the future, the Martian surface. And that actually was a broader vision with which the rover project was sanctioned. It was effectively granted. And yeah, so we are a,  and it was hard, like, don’t get me wrong, this is  so if you have to basically miniaturize something, there’s a lot of trade offs you have to work around. So for example, battery efficiency, thermal efficiency. How do you keep the rover charging while also not keeping them space grade. So there’s fundamentally a lot of technical problems that needs to be addressed.

Vignan Velivela: And,  including things like, you know, there’s no one to repair on the moon. So if you, you have just like one shot to get this, right. Yeah. But at the same time, having, let’s say, hundreds of robots gives you like, many shots. So even if a couple of them fail, it’s not the end of the mission. And I think that’s the reliability and redundancy that can be built with smaller units of something. And, you know, that’s a direction that I feel the broader space community is taking in general. So we have seen this with Earth imaging. We have seen this with communication satellites, with Starlink, where if you look at an average Starlink satellite today, it’s actually quite compact. And,  same time, we have a worldwide network of internet providing satellites. That’s only possible because of that approach that was taken,  and,  so this makes space travel and space exploration a lot more accessible and fun. And so,  that’s probably so, and especially when you’re working around constraints like that, like our project was that you had to develop a space worthy rover in under two kilograms, which effectively was never done before. And it was a lot of interesting challenges that we had to overcome to make it work. And,  you know, in fact, the team has ultimately launched that rover late last year. And,  it’s fun to see the progress over the years over some of these projects. Yeah, that’s the background.

 Kevin Rosenqvist: Yeah. That has to be amazing to watch it go. And. Yeah, that’s so cool. Let’s come back to Earth. My pun for the day. You founded a to B,  in 2019. Before we get into the company, what did you learn about entrepreneurship from your first startup startup that really helped you when you founded A to B in 2019.

Vignan Velivela: So I always wanted to work on important and useful problems. And,  my way of solving those problems is to do it by starting new businesses and effectively bringing a team of like minded individuals to work on a problem. And in case of my first company, it was the problem of how do you provide financial access to people who are particularly challenged by the place they were born or because of the income they generate? And fundamentally, we were like looking at technology as the primary way to solve that problem, not regulatory changes, not, you know, massive infrastructure changes, but like simple tools to effectively solve the problem of financial access. I think the second time I’ve started it is when I started A to B, we were effectively looking at similar methods, which is so the commercial fleet world, whether it’s trucking in general are the broader commercial fleet world that includes school buses, ambulances, door delivery services.

 Kevin Rosenqvist: Postal companies, postal. Yeah, I saw that online. Yeah.

Vignan Velivela: Yeah, exactly. So pretty much all of them have archaic infrastructure,  underlying their operations. So when I’m talking about an average trucking company, that’s, let’s say bringing you Amazon packages today, these are trucking companies that are mostly small businesses. So they have effectively maybe 5 or 10 people in their company. And effectively they are,  supporting hundreds of deliveries a day. And so we as consumers expect our deliveries to happen the same day or next day.  e-commerce bar has been.

 Kevin Rosenqvist: Raised over the last ten years, right? We all expect it. We all expect it to come now.

Vignan Velivela: Exactly. But the delivery driver who is bringing that package to your doorstep is getting paid two weeks later. And the small business was actually supporting and instrumental in that process getting paid 30 days later. Unfortunately, those are the problems that are yet not solved, where we have solved the harder problem of how to bring packages from city to city in a day or so. But the relatively easier problem of payments has not been solved. And that we saw it was like a clear misalignment of the system and where we can definitely fix. And we dug deeper. And what we realized was very fascinating, which is so commercial fleets and trucking in particular, run on the world’s largest closed loop network. And this is a card network that’s primarily built for commercial fleets. And trucking, for example, is the size of a European economy. It’s roughly $1 trillion in size between the US and Canada. And you are supporting looking at a $1 trillion economy with if you are looking at it from the lens of a parallel country, it has its own banking system. It has its own card network, and it also has its own,  you know, taxation and,  invoice payment systems.

Vignan Velivela: So everything we take for granted about,  you know, how do you get paid or,  who gives you loans to operate your business and get working capital? All of those are actually not standard for trucking. And so while I was working at Cruise Automation, we were like,  particularly talking to a lot of bus operators and other shared transportation fleets, just to understand how the other side of transportation works. And most of us are usually not aware of it because, you know, when you are buying groceries at your local grocery store or when you are effectively picking up packages, there is a layer of abstraction between the consumer or the end user versus the rest of the logistics industry. So we don’t really interact with the truck driver much. We don’t interact with a delivery person as much, but at the end of the day, they are the hard working, everyday Americans who are hauling loads all day long and also dealing with this archaic,  parallel ecosystem of payments and banking and, you know, struggling with the challenges that come with these old school systems. So that’s how we got started into trucking payments.

 Kevin Rosenqvist: That’s really cool. And so you’re doing A to B is modernizing financial systems with trucking and transportation industries in a lot of different ways. And one of the biggest ones is with fuel. The first asset,  you know, is the biggest or I’m sorry, the first asset providing fuel discounts for your clients. How are you able to provide that for people? The fuel discounts.

Vignan Velivela: So I’d probably start by sharing more background about why fuel and first of all, like how does it matter if fuel has discounts or not? So it turns out,  trucking as an industry is also the largest consumer of a commodity on a card network. So the commodity is commercial fuel and it’s bought on a card network. You don’t really see commodities being bought on, you know, regular payment systems. They’re usually bought on an exchange, like if you have to buy steel, cotton or corn. Any such commodities are usually bought or sold through a financial exchange between two businesses, like big parties, trucking. On the other hand, 95% of trucking is small businesses, and these are small businesses that are spread across the US. So they can be in rural Idaho or urban LA, or they can be in rural Georgia, Nebraska. So effectively they’re very distributed. And there’s no like common hub for where you can buy fuel. So effectively, you have to build a system that enables truck drivers to buy large value goods using a simple plastic card. And for that reason, as early as 1960s, fuel card networks were created as a separate parallel network to the more commonly used Visa and Mastercard network. And so these are like actual independent networks that don’t interact with Visa and Mastercard. And they have effectively like a fairly outdated standard for how purchase is enabled. And mind you, like an average truck is basically spending thousands of dollars on fuel every other week or sometimes more. And fundamentally, that’s a key problem space that we first identified to go after. Because fuel is the number one cost for these trucking companies, it’s higher than what they would pay for wages or payroll effectively. And it’s also the running on the most broken card network,  and also the largest closed loop network in the world.

Vignan Velivela: So we figured why not basically build the infrastructure from the ground up and effectively build it on modern systems. So instead of building on, you know, the 80s era IBM mainframes that these legacy networks are running on, we decided to build it on open loop networks. So we work closely with visa and Mastercard. We also work in a cloud native basis. So we have taken an approach which is more a 21st century approach to building payments versus the current state of affairs, which is primarily 20th century. And I give you that contrast because the end result of having broken infrastructure in trucking is that payments get delayed and when payments get delayed, I told you this problem of how truck drivers get paid two weeks later and the small businesses get paid 30 days later, so when they have to wait for their own payments to happen, they also have to take expensive loans, like an average truck driver takes constantly payday loans to pay for his or her day to day expenses. Small business is taking a loan roughly equivalent to a credit card loan, like 30% Apr. Type loans for just paying for their fuel, wages and other operating expenses. And this is completely avoidable. So we are living in a world where same day payments is possible. So if you are, for example, ordering an Uber today, ordering groceries from Instacart or DoorDash today, the driver who is helping you complete that service is getting paid same day the restaurant or the grocery store who is doing that service is getting paid same day. So in the gig economy, we have implemented same day and that has created a lot of value, which created a lot.

 Kevin Rosenqvist: More interest, millions.

Vignan Velivela: Of job.

 Kevin Rosenqvist: Opportunities for the drivers and for the. Absolutely.

Vignan Velivela: Yeah, absolutely. So it has helped both the small businesses and the drivers to thrive. And, you know, the founders of those companies like Instacart or DoorDash and others like Uber, they’re all angel investors in us. And, you know, they have told from time to time that during the creation of their own marketplaces, one of the pivotal growth points was implementing same day payments. And that’s when we realized that this is like a solved problem in a different context, where you can have same day payments. In a B2B world, you can have same day driver payments. So we said, let’s start with fuel and eventually expand to doing same day payments for all use cases within trucking. And so today we started on the fuel card. We are the fastest growing company in the space, and we have also actively built relations with the merchants who are the ones who are supplying this fuel. So in case of a trucking commercial, fuel is the primary thing they are buying. They’re not usually going to your local Chevron or shell. They’re also going to Laos or to Petro or pilot flying J. And these are like the truck stops where truckers actually go to fuel. And it’s a massive industry. And, you know, most of the consumers who have a small regular car wouldn’t ever go to a truck stop for refueling.

Vignan Velivela: But typically that’s where truckers go. So not only is the payments infrastructure parallel for trucking, also the energy infrastructure is parallel. And so those are the things that we are actively modernizing. So we are helping reduce fraud in fuel transactions. We’re helping reduce wastage and improve fleet wide efficiency with these modern fuel cards. So the fuel card is primarily just a card, but I think all the engineering and technology is in the background. So we connect to various data sources: payment acquirers, acquirer processors, card networks. And we are not just a payments company. We are a data company. And our fundamental goal is how do we save money for the fleets and help them get paid faster, and how do we save them time of all these operational burdens they are currently taking. So in many ways, the saving time and saving cost is two goals that we are constantly working on. And so fuel is the number one cost outside of fuel. We are also helping these same drivers get paid faster, same day like a DoorDash or Uber driver. So this is roughly how we can think about Adobe today.

 Kevin Rosenqvist: And you also have a way to help mitigate fraud. You mentioned it briefly. You can block transactions when the client’s vehicle isn’t physically at the pump. Right. So the car does that mean. So the card is tied to the vehicle. And you can also cap the purchase for as much as the fuel tank holds, which obviously keeps people from gassing up their own cars while they’re doing their truck too. But like, I mean, that’s pretty incredible. How how are you guys able to connect those two? Is it just is it how you do that.

Vignan Velivela: No, it is definitely a non-trivial challenge because most of the truckers are not necessarily in big cities trying to complete their fueling here. Most of them are actually on highways, and they are in remote places, sometimes in places like national parks or Indian reservations, where there’s not even a cell phone signal. So we had to, like, really understand the operating environment we were dealing with, because just expecting that we’ll do something using a smartphone app was just not sufficient, because you have to think.

 Kevin Rosenqvist: About that and think about the connectivity issues. Yeah.

Vignan Velivela: Yes, exactly. So one is connectivity. The second is truckers don’t always carry a smartphone. So sometimes they carry a feature phone that’s just like a 2G or 3G network. And  part of the reason is,  they don’t want to be distracted while driving. And, you know, there’s all these,  constant distractions that you have with the smartphone, so they.

 Kevin Rosenqvist: Don’t know what you’re talking about. I have no idea what you’re talking about.

Vignan Velivela: Me neither. But. So, so, so fundamentally, we had to like, figure out ways to integrate directly into their vehicles and also integrate directly into the payment systems of the merchant and the merchant. Here is the gas station or the truck stop where they’re going to fuel. And,  effectively we by doing that, what we could do is a prevent fraud. So the first and foremost thing we could do is that any version of misuse of these cards cannot happen, because you have to have the driver, the vehicle and the location of the merchant match in the exact same time, and it’s a real time authorization. The second thing we did is we also like look at vehicle analysis. We do our own version of vehicle analysis to see what was the start and end tank level of the fuel tank. If they bought, let’s say, ten gallons of fuel, did all the ten gallons go into the tank? We also like to do routing analysis. So we actually help the driver and the fleet owner To go to the most fuel efficient station and also choose the most fuel efficient route. So this has fundamentally helped them save around 15 to 20% on fuel, which is actually outside of the additional things we are providing in terms of discounts. So through discounts, we are saving another 20%, 15 to 20% on retail price to what we are able to sell. So that’s the broader theme of what we are doing, which is we are basically making fleets become a lot more efficient in terms of their operating expenses and become a lot more resilient in terms of financial services.

Vignan Velivela: So a bad way can sometimes be very hard for a trucking company or a driver who, let’s say, doesn’t have wages to support for that week. So we are providing them that financial cushion, making sure that small businesses who are ultimately the largest job creators in our economy, and the wealth creators in our economy are getting the best possible technology tools to operate their business. And this has been our focus from day one, which is how do we make sure that the small guy is benefiting from these tools? Because fraud doesn’t help anybody, but effectively happens when you have fraud and inefficient. Fueling operations is that that cost back into the system. So trucking gets more expensive. When trucking gets more expensive, the food you are buying at your grocery store get more expensive, right? The packages you are buying or the medical services you are getting from healthcare networks get more expensive. So it’s almost like a silent tax that everybody is paying, because we haven’t solved the fundamental problem of payments in the first place. And I think that’s the tax we are eliminating here. And,  and, you know, this effectively makes every stakeholder in the system win by lowering cost. Overall, nobody wants to pay unnecessarily more excess. It’s a waste of money and time for everyone, and that’s fundamentally what we are aligning into. Well, before.

 Kevin Rosenqvist: We go, I’d like to get your take on on something on. Do you do you have any insight on the whole idea of driverless trucks? I mean, that was something that we heard about years ago. And, and people were starting to worry that jobs in the trucking industry would be lost quickly. And, you know, from your view, as someone who’s involved with transportation and has experience with autonomous vehicles, is this something that you still see coming to fruition?

Vignan Velivela: So I’m a technologist at heart, so I’d probably start by saying that electric vehicles and autonomous vehicles are an inevitable future in a 50 year time horizon, but it’s highly unlikely in a 10 to 20 year time horizon for it to be a majority service. And the reason is, you see, I operate based on these first principles and first principles are grounded in physics. And and if you think about systems have evolved even the most fundamentally, breakthrough technologies took decades to get mainstream adoption. Like take, for example, the case of the invention of the car. So almost 100 years ago, or rather 120 years ago, when the model T was announced, the car is obviously a lot more efficient than a horse cart. Like nobody would deny that in 21st century, but it still took a car to be several decades to become the majority transportation in that day, because people were just like running on horse carts. If you see old pictures of San Francisco or New York or any other large city like Chicago, you’ll see that most of the streets are filled with horse cars and horses. Most of the houses were designed around horses and horse carts, and the reality is that electric vehicles is a effectively like the next generation of cars and transportation fleets in general, but the infrastructure that is required to support them are for, for example, autonomous vehicles is significantly higher. So, for example, even today I’m a fan of electric vehicles in general.

Vignan Velivela: I personally have a EV two, but the charging infrastructure that is required for trucks to operate electrically is just not there. So trucks are like heavy users of electric vehicles. And in fact, I see that the semi trucks will actually get electrified. Likely the last because they have the most energy intensity and also are also the most price conscious. Sure. So like an average car driver will probably pay like two x the price for charging at a peak time, but most trucking companies would refrain from paying like significantly higher prices. So and this is like that dichotomy where if you want to serve the trucking company, you have to be both the cheapest source of energy and also have the most possible convenience. Because most truckers are actually not driving in big cities, they are driving on highways. They are driving in places where, as I told you, there’s no cell phone signals, right? Yeah. So if you don’t have charging infrastructure and all these locations, it’s actually very hard for truckers to invest and change their fleets. And the the other reality is, Kevin, that we basically have almost 95% trucking industry running on small businesses. And these small businesses do not have the capital to effectively transition overnight to electric vehicles or autonomous vehicles. They just are running on very thin margins. And that’s how the rest of the industry is structured.

Vignan Velivela: So there is no so in the retail world, for example, Amazon or Walmart, Costco, target, 4 or 5 companies combined are the majority players. Effectively, there’s like a,   you know, power law in retail where if you look at the top ten players, you probably accounted for 80, 90% of the entire market. In case of trucking, the top ten players combined don’t even have 10% market share. Even if you want to make the technologies more mainstream, there’s a the problem of infrastructure to support them that’s lacking. And b the capital required to transition is lacking. But I think from our point of view, from A to B point of view, we are a energy payments company, so we are agnostic to whether fleets will run on electricity or biofuel, natural gas, or maybe any other version of fuel in the future. We are here to just support and help them pick the cheapest possible energy resource and also the most efficient one. So in many ways we are operating as a payments and a pure payments and software company. And,  we provide give them the access to every single charging station possible on the road and also every alternative energy stations. And so that’s something we have seen from time to time, is that consumers are transitioning to EVs and eventually autonomous vehicles. But I think the fleets are barely there. And. Yeah.

 Kevin Rosenqvist: Yeah. All right. Well, Vignan , thank you so much for being here. The company is a to be they are modernizing the transportation industry. And thank you for being here. Really appreciate you taking the time.
Vignan Velivela: Thank you Kevin I appreciate the time.