ICONIQ Capital Invests In Truckstop.com At $1B Valuation

This morning Truckstop.com announced that ICONIQ Capital, a leading Silicon Valley growth equity firm, has made a majority investment in the online freight matching and load board solution. The whisper number heard for the pre-money valuation was just under $1 billion.

ICONIQ Capital has closely guarded the identities of its limited partners, but they are known to be a who's who of Silicon Valley billionaire family offices. Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Dustin Moskovitz and Sheryl Sandberg are all investors, as is LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman and Twitter and Square's Jack Dorsey. ICONIQ maintains offices in San Francisco, New York, Palo Alto and Singapore.

"The $1 trillion freight industry is primed for incredible growth and technology adoption in the coming years, as tech-enabled platforms are increasingly essential for managing operations, reducing costs and improving efficiency," said Will Griffith, Partner at ICONIQ Capital, in a statement. "Truckstop.com is the premier and trusted partner in this space, with an advanced technology platform that removes friction for all parties within the freight ecosystem, and an established network of transportation professionals across the country."

Truckstop.com's annual revenue is in the $110-120 million range. The financial terms of the deal have not been disclosed, but given ICONIQ's investors and philosophy it is expected that Truckstop.com was valued on a revenue multiple of 8x to 9x, typical practice for software-as-a-service companies in a growth phase rather than an EBITDA multiple.

That said, it's probably more correct to think of ICONIQ's Truckstop.com deal as making a "platform-as-a-service" play, rather than the simple acquisition of an individual software product. Platform-as-a-service is a term coined by Marc Benioff to describe Salesforce. It is defined as "a cloud model that provides all the infrastructure required to create and manage custom cloud apps." In other words, a platform-as-a-service company encourages other developers to build their own apps on top of the original platform – think of all the startups that customize Salesforce and build new products within the Salesforce ecosystem.

Today, Truckstop.com's offerings include payments, transactional insurance, freight tracking and visibility, marketplace rates, load matching, factoring and a transportation management system (TMS), offering a nearly complete workflow business for trucking transportation. FreightWaves expects the enormous resources now at Truckstop.com's disposal to be deployed in acquisitions – snapping up smaller FreightTech start-ups whose products are destined to become ‘features' of Truckstop.com's platform – and in accelerating organic growth.

The general partners at ICONIQ have the capital, expertise and strategic vision necessary to rapidly build multi-billion dollar technology companies. According to Crunchbase, ICONIQ's portfolio of companies includes tech standouts DocuSign, Robinhood, SurveyMonkey and HeadSpin.

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