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Her software startup, , is currently part of the winter batch at and has just raised $600,000 in venture capital from a crop of investors.

Notable investors in TrueNorth include Y Combinator, CEO Jack Altman, CEO Parker Conrad and CSO Peter Fishman. Liquid2, Joe Montana鈥檚 fund, and others also invested.

While we usually don鈥檛 cover rounds of this size, an uptick in funding for the logistics and freight space made us more keen to look at what it takes for a new startup to enter the market, especially when billion-dollar companies like take much of the spotlight.

TrueNorth

Stedge was adopted as a child by a family of truckers, and that upbringing led her to have personal insight into the weaknesses of the industry.

Her grandparents were truckers in the 1980s–and 鈥�40 years later, little has changed,鈥� from a technology perspective she told SA国际传媒 News. She pointed to her cousin, Tom, who is a trucker.

鈥淗e still operates primarily on phone calls and mail,鈥� she said. 鈥淢ost financial tools in the industry are clunky at best, predatory at worst.鈥�

TrueNorth, founded by Stedge and , offers software that puts 鈥渋ndependent truckers under one roof.鈥� While the company doesn鈥檛 lease trucks, it helps truckers have a platform to manage insurance, fuel and maintenance. Think of it as an operating system, but for trucks. It also helps truckers with route optimization, dispatch and load coordination, and automated tracking.

The entrepreneur considers average trucking agencies like as her competitors.

Currently, truckers have to choose between working in a large fleet like JB Hunt with little independence, or give up revenue by being a solo operation. TrueNorth claims it offers large-fleet resources, like those listed above, with a lower take rate than traditional companies because its back-office is powered by software.

鈥淲e cut down the busywork to 10 percent of what it traditionally is, so that our employees can focus on the relationship side of trucking,鈥� she wrote in a blog post.

The TrueNorth founders previously spent time at where they worked on autonomous trucking technology. So this isn鈥檛 their first road trip.

鈥淎utonomy is really far away, at least a decade or two,鈥� she said. 鈥淎nd it鈥檚 not going to displace truckers any time soon.鈥�

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Now that Kleiner’s split from Mary Meeker (now of Bond) is , its new crew is free to make its mark. That in mind, I’ve been keeping an eye on where , , , , and the rest deploy capital out of their new fund.1

Given that Kleiner is a firm with a number of investing partners and a host of prior investments to top-up from time to time, its deal flow is .

Still, Kleiner announced a brace of deals in the health space this week that caught my eye. Let’s peek at a few recent deals from the group, see if we can find a pattern, and then poke at the health-tech deals and see if they fit into the mix in any particular way.

Recently

Returning to the start of April, SA国际传媒 has Kleiner down as taking part in the , the , the , the , the , the , and the . All that before we even get to its latest health-related deals.

It’s a lot of deal flow to keep track of. Really an impossible amount if you want to do anything else, but for fun, here’s how I would categorize those deals:

• : HR and personal redemption.
• : Logistics.
• : AI.
• : “Social P2P Marketplace for Gen Z (YC W18)” per SA国际传媒, which I cannot improve upon.
• : Dev tools.
• : Furniture-as-a-service.
• : Maisie Williams’s creative collab startup.

The list of recent early-stage deals from Kleiner is pretty diverse. It doesn’t, at least looking at this fraction of Kleiner’s deals, have a super consistent theme; vertical SaaS or greentech this is not.

When I started writing to you this morning, I had hoped that we’d find some trend to put the and the into, but I can’t quite see it. So, let’s examine those two firms so that we have at least that in hand:

• : A coaching app focused on “1-on-1 digital training” per . If you are somewhat wealthy (have a smartphone, have access to gym equipment, and can afford to pay around $150 a month for extra training), the service will help you work out more often and better, I presume. Kleiner led its $8.5 million Series A.
• : A mental health “platform” for employers to take better care of workers, it seems. The firm’s website isn’t super explicit (it’s lists team, values, and leadership, but not a declarative we-do-this statement), but there’s a lot to like here, frankly. It’s working to lessen a material problem (the lack of mental healthcare available to folks), was founded by women, and appears to have all sides of its marketplace of sorts figured out (employees, employers, care providers). Kleiner co-led its $9 million Series A.

So today we’ve learned two things. First, that Kleiner is cutting lots of checks. And, that it’s doing so with self-confidence. You don’t get that many deals done in that many spaces if you aren’t trusting yourself, I reckon.

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