Guillermo Garcia

American trucking runs on people you never see. Roughly 3.5 million drivers move the country's freight, and a huge share of them are one-person or mom-and-pop operations - a single owner-operator holding the keys to an asset worth $150,000 to $200,000, competing against fleets with entire back offices. Guillermo Garcia built SmartHop for exactly that person.

"What we do is sell this business in a box that gives all the tools and resources that a small trucking company needs."

SmartHop is pitched as an autonomous dispatcher: an AI-driven platform that scans load boards and broker networks, learns a driver's habits and the market's rhythms, and pairs them with the freight that actually pays. Load filtering, market heatmaps, trip and invoice management, dispatch automation, financial tooling - the unglamorous machinery a large carrier takes for granted, packaged for someone running one or two trucks. The company is headquartered in Miami and operates remote-first, with teams reaching from New York to Colombia.

The bet underneath it is contrarian. Most freight-tech chases the big fleets and the brokers. Garcia went the other way, toward the fragmented, unglamorous long tail of independent drivers - the ones who, in his telling, are embracing technology not as a novelty but as the only way to survive.

Garcia is from Venezuela, and he did not arrive at logistics through a pitch deck. An industrial engineer by training - UCAB, class of the mid-2000s, with a logistics focus - he spent about three years inside Nestle's supply chain before the itch to build his own thing won out.

He started by delivering. Pet food, routes, a single Sprinter van. There was no venture ecosystem to lean on; in Venezuela at the time, that simply was not a thing. So he did it the hard way and grew the company on its own cash flow. It became a logistics operation of nearly 500 people, moving goods for the likes of PepsiCo, Nestle and Unilever.

"We started with one Sprinter van," he has said. "We bootstrapped all the way through; that company still exists and runs." It is the kind of line founders usually invent for the retelling. In his case it is just the record.

Political and economic instability made staying untenable. Garcia moved his ambitions to the United States and enrolled in an entrepreneurship program at Columbia aimed at Latin American founders - later stacking executive stints at MIT and IESA onto the engineering degree.

Then he did the obvious thing for a trucking person: he started trucking. A Miami LTL operation that grew into full-truckload, over-the-road runs with more than 40 trucks. And it was there, inside his own fleet, that the SmartHop idea arrived - not as a market thesis but as a daily irritation. The tools were bad. The information was fragmented. The small operator was always a step behind the broker and the board.

So in 2017 he co-founded SmartHop with Joaquin Brillembourg and Miguel Sucre, aiming the software squarely at the disadvantage he had lived. This time he took the money: a $4.5M seed, then a Series A led by Union Square Ventures, then a $30M+ Series B in early 2022 with Greycroft, RyderVentures, Equal Ventures, Sozo Ventures and Las Olas VC around the table. Total funding has climbed past $56 million.