In partnership with

Sometimes some fresh thinking can add value to an established market. That’s what Verifleet wants to do for businesses with fleets of vehicles, either operated in-house or owned by their employees.

Read on for full details.

– Martin

Try Artisan’s All-in-one Outbound Sales Platform & AI BDR

Ava automates your entire outbound demand generation so you can get leads delivered to your inbox on autopilot. She operates within the Artisan platform, which consolidates every tool you need for outbound:

• 300M+ High-Quality B2B Prospects, including E-Commerce and Local Business Leads

• Automated Lead Enrichment With 10+ Data Sources

• Full Email Deliverability Management

• Multi-Channel Outreach Across Email & LinkedIn

• Human-Level Personalization

Book a demo to see what Ava can do.

Verifleet wants to help businesses manage the risk of running a vehicle fleet

If you think about it, having a fleet of vehicles out of the road is a huge risk for businesses. More than that, it’s a dizzying range of risks multiplied by the number of vehicles in the fleet.

Fleet risk management is a field of software that has emerged to make managing the risks around fleet vehicles easier to handle.

Verifleet is a new entrant aiming to take a decent chunk of the market with its SaaS offering.

“The way I summarise our differentiation is that others talk strongly about digitising admin, which we do as well, we can kill spreadsheets and we can save admin time. But that's where they end and where our true value begins,” says Verifleet founder Richard Stowe.

Verifleet is pitched as surfacing risks that could cause disruption and reputational damage, to a business, costing more than just admin time.

“Where we're different is we say, for any given vehicle, we understand the risks of neglect for it, for a driver and that vehicle, and we also understand failure patterns for a given vehicle as well. We do all of the the administrative compliance stuff, but we take it further, and we prevent disruption as well,” says Stowe.

“We've built an intelligence engine that can take a vehicle, and it can paint a picture of that vehicle over time.”

Stowe gives an example from Verifleet’s data, which shows that in 2024, 40% of Vauxhall Movano vans from 2019 that were presented for MOT failed.

“We spotted things like at 70,000 miles, the subframes corrode. At 50,000 miles, there's brake failure, brake lines corrode. And what our intelligence can do is it can understand the makeup of a company's fleet, and start tailoring inspections and maintenance around those vehicles to keep them on the road, lower disruption, and maintain greater financial value in the fleet.”

On top of this it wants to help businesses manage their net-zero commitments, which can be tricky for them to make sense of when they allow staff to use their own vehicles for work. Imagine a community nurse who uses their own Ford Fiesta to get to patients, and claims expenses for mileage. This is what’s known as ‘grey fleet’.

“When it comes to emissions reporting, grey fleet emissions are reported under Scope 3 on ESG reports, anything company owned is under Scope 1. And to be completely honest, it's like the Wild West out there with Scope 3,” says Stowe.

“Organisations have got very good at emissions reporting for Scope 1 and 2, but not so good at Scope 3. Scope 3 is the biggest contributor, typically, to an organisation's emissions, and grey fleet is often a big part of that, and at best it's estimates, even if it’s tracked at all.

“Following EU trends, it's likely that Scope 3 emissions reporting will be mandated by January next year, which means companies will have to be using something to record their grey fleet and commuting environmental impact,” Stowe speculates.

Verifleet can calculate these Scope 3 emissions with just a vehicle registration number and mileage details.

Finally, Verifleet helps customers ensure their vehicles are compliant with relevant safety legislation, to help avoid costly and painful litigation if something goes wrong.

The story so far

Stowe has been a software engineer for a variety of companies since the mid-2000s, but four years ago he got the entrepreneurship bug, launching a consultancy with some colleagues.

Unfulfilled by this work, he realised he yearned to build a product of his own. The idea of Verifleet was born with Stowe’s brother asked for help with the vans his construction company operates.

“We started understanding the problems he had with disruption and scheduling MOTs and things like that, and we built a very small fleet management piece for him that suddenly had so much value. We thought, ‘we're onto something’,” Stowe recalls.

Keeping it in the family, he says he looked to his mum who was an insurance officer for a large charity and oversaw 1,000 grey fleet vehicles.

“The more I started digging, the more I realised how big of a national problem this is. These are employee-owned vehicles that employers have should have a legal duty of care to oversee, and are struggling because it's hard.”

Verifleet’s founding team has signed up its first customers. Among them are a company that manages grey fleets on behalf of other businesses, and a housing association.

“All of those companies have grey fleet vehicles. And we're finding that our entry point is through grey fleet,” says Stowe.

He expands on Verifleet’s current sales strategy:

“We try to start with frictionless, high impact, small projects, which are low risk to the customer so we can prove ourselves. So a small engagement project might look like a one-off emissions report. We will look back a year, for example, and we can validate the estimates you made against real data. And we can, we can land that in five days.

“Once we've done that, you're onboarded, because we've got all of your mileage claims data, we know what your grey fleet looks like, and it's very easy to open the conversation to ‘do you want to turn this into an ongoing SaaS subscription where we look after your fleet?’ It's frictionless.”

Subscribe to Premium to read the rest.