While Hayden Cardiff was finishing his M.B.A. at Carnegie Mellon, he started consulting for Pitt Ohio, large trucking company headquartered in Pittsburgh. Though he had already worked with his classmate Thomas Healy to launch electric truck startup Hyliion—which went on to go public last fall—Cardiff never expected that trucking would become his thing. “If you had asked me 10 or 15 years ago if I would’ve gotten into trucking, I would’ve told you absolutely not,” Cardiff, 31, says.

Now, Cardiff, along with his cofounders and former CMU classmates Nick Bartel, 36, and Andrew Russell, 30, is set to announce a $20 million series B raised by Idelic, a startup that applies AI and machine learning to data from trucking fleets in order to ensure driver safety and streamline logistics. As the threat of “nuclear verdicts”—jury awards in accident lawsuits that exceed $10 million—continues to drive up insurance costs for commercial auto, Idelic also hopes to use its software to reduce them.
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