How an Uzbek entrepreneur built a successful startup earning millions in the U.S.

Shohruh Rahmanov, 34 years old, Chicago, co-founder Datatruck, LinkedIn

How it all started

My name is Shohruh Rahmanov, originally from Uzbekistan, with over 10 years of experience in finance. In 2021, I received a Fulbright scholarship and completed my MBA at the Simon Business School, University of Rochester. After graduation, I joined Datatruck, Inc., where I now serve as Co-founder.

The idea for Datatruck came from firsthand exposure to the inefficiencies in the U.S. trucking industry. Small and mid-sized trucking companies were still relying heavily on manual operations, spreadsheets, and paper-based processes. They calculated financial reports or management reports manually or did not know at all how to calculate them, and because of this, the average trucking company was losing $50,000 per year. They were not aware of these losses either. Alongside my technical co-founders, we saw a clear opportunity to bring automation and real-time financial transparency to these companies.

Launching a startup

Once we had assembled co-founders, a team, and advisors, we searched for investors, and within our 10th investor pitch, one of my friends invested in our idea without an MVP, and we raised a $200,000 angel round. In the beginning, we focused on deep customer discovery — talking to dozens of trucking company owners, dispatchers, and drivers to understand their pain points. We launched a simple MVP to test key assumptions and started gaining traction through our network, diaspora, direct outreach, industry events, and referrals.

We built our team around the mission: we sought out people who understood the industry, could adapt quickly, and cared about building something impactful. Our goal was to save money and time for every trucker out there and help them understand financial literacy. Our early engineers were versatile and hands-on — everyone wore multiple hats and contributed beyond their job titles.

Target Audience

Our core customers are small to mid-sized trucking companies in the U.S. — typically those managing 5 to 200 trucks. We are essentially a financial operating system for trucking companies, and we solve critical problems like dispatching, invoicing, expense tracking, driver payroll, and real-time financial reporting.

Currently, more than 300 companies across multiple U.S. states actively use our platform. We've also partnered with 100+ trucking partners to bring all ecosystems into one system of records, and they include factoring companies, fuel and toll providers, freight brokers, and insurance agents, integrating their data into our system to further streamline our clients’ workflows.

Recently, we started to get good traction with upmarket clients, and now we are working with big fleet-size companies with 300–1,000 trucks.

Incubation programs

We have participated in multiple accelerator programs and have raised venture funding, including from funds backed by Microsoft and AWS. These programs provided us not only with capital but also access to infrastructure, mentorship, and early partnerships.

We’ve also received support from local startup ecosystems in cities like Rochester and Chicago, which helped us scale in the early stages.

Challenges

One major challenge was convincing traditional trucking companies to adopt new technology. Many still rely on Excel and legacy systems. We invested a lot into user education and building a product that feels intuitive. Especially, reaching 100 customers was challenging, but once we were there, we kept accelerating.

Hiring top engineering talent was also tough due to competition with Big Tech firms. We overcame that by creating a strong mission-driven culture and offering flexible remote roles.

Advice for early-stage founders: Work closely with your first users — they are your co-creators. Do not be afraid to pivot or rebuild parts of the product. Feedback is more valuable than ego. Remember, if the client is giving you feedback, it is a blessing and they care about your product.

Achievements

— successfully launched and commercialized the product
— raised venture capital from strategic investors, Total closed funding amount is almost $1 million with recent Pre-Series A Bridge round that includes Aloka Ventures, IT Park Ventures, Domino Ventures, Silkroad Innovation Hub
— formed partnerships with key players in the logistics industry — 100+ integrations
— built a growing customer base with recurring revenue — Reached more than $1 million revenue last year and our next goal is to reach $10 million
— launched TruckGPT — our AI module for business analytics and automated financial reporting
— launched our next FinTech product called Fintruck — it is essentially “1C for trucking companies”.

Plans

By the end of this year, we plan to expand into the Canadian market and move upmarket, launch FinTech offerings, roll out our AI agents across workflows, triple our customer base, deepen integrations with payment processors and GPS providers, and begin preparing for our Series A fundraising round.

Our long-term vision is to become the #1 financial operating system for trucking companies in North America.