She runs the company teaching 53-foot steel boxes to think, feel, and report for duty.
Most of trucking's attention goes to the front half - the cab, the engine, the driver, the thousand sensors crammed under the hood. Lisa Mullen looked at the other half. The trailer. The dumb steel box dragged behind, counting for roughly half the rig and contributing almost none of the data. At Drōv Technologies, where she is CEO and Managing Partner, that imbalance is the whole business.
Her line for it is blunt: "The trailer has been the forgotten asset in the telematics world until recently." Drōv's job is to un-forget it. The company builds AirBoxOne, an IoT gateway that bolts onto a trailer and wires it up with senses it never had - tire pressure that adjusts itself to the load, cameras watching the cargo, sensors reading wheel-end temperature, weight, G-forces, door locks, and GPS. The box stops being cargo and starts being a colleague.
Drōv is headquartered in Oklahoma City, a long way from the coasts that usually claim the word "startup." About two dozen people. One very specific obsession. And a CEO who will tell you, without irony, that the right answer to a dirty floor is to pick up the broom.
It helps to picture the asset she's talking about. A trailer is half the rig and almost none of the conversation. It gets dropped in a yard and forgotten. It gets hooked to a different cab every week. Nobody asks it how it's feeling. For decades the industry poured its engineering budget into the part with the steering wheel and treated the back half as freight that happened to have wheels. Mullen's whole argument is that the silence was a choice, not a law of physics - and choices can be unmade.
When a group of investors and partners bought the company, it sold one thing: a mechanical tire-inflation product. The obvious move was to keep selling it. Mullen and her partners did the opposite. They pulled the existing products off the market and re-engineered the wheel-end componentry from the ground up.
It is the kind of decision that sounds reckless in the retelling and obvious only in hindsight. A single mechanical gadget is a product. A platform that any fleet, any manufacturer, any sensor can plug into is a company. Drōv rebranded in 2016 and pointed itself at the second thing.
The thesis, in Mullen's words: "The last five years have brought tremendous innovation to the transportation industry, but the development of trailer technology has lagged other innovations in the trucking industry." If the truck got smart and the trailer didn't, the gap was the opportunity.
There's a quieter discipline hiding in that decision. Starting over meant walking away from revenue the company already had - the mechanical product was selling - in exchange for a platform that didn't exist yet. Founders talk a lot about focus; far fewer will torch a working SKU to get it. The re-engineered wheel-end and the patented pressure system that came out the other side are now the parts of Drōv hardest for anyone else to clone.
Before: a standalone mechanical tire-inflation device. One job, one sale.
After: AirBoxOne - an open, agnostic IoT hub with a patented tire pressure management system at its core and a constellation of sensors hanging off it.
Anyone can slap a tracker on a box. Re-engineering the wheel-end componentry and pairing it with a patented inflation system is the part that took nerve - and the part competitors can't shortcut.
Bolt the box on and the trailer wakes up. Here is what it starts paying attention to - and beaming back to the driver and the home office in real time.
Inflates and deflates automatically based on the load. Catches valve-stem leaks before they become blowouts.
Reads bearing temperature and wheel-end vibration to flag a thermal problem before it turns into a fire.
Cargo cameras and load sensors watch what's inside - security breaches, weight distribution, the works.
Always-on location for the asset that used to vanish the moment it was dropped in a yard.
Knows when a door opens, where, and when - turning theft from a mystery into a timestamp.
Accelerometers register extreme G-forces and impacts, so rough handling leaves a record.
She took the wheel just as the world stopped. The pandemic was not a footnote to her first year as CEO - it was her first year as CEO.
If you're the CEO, you will go out still and sweep the floor if it needs to be swept.
Hardware is unforgiving. You cannot ship a patch overnight to a steel box already rolling down I-40. That makes the team the product, and Mullen talks about people the way other founders talk about traction.
Stepping into the top job in March 2020 meant building that team in the worst possible conditions - hiring, onboarding, and shipping through a pandemic. Her fix was not a slogan. It was a habit: tell people their work matters, and mean it, daily. "It's important to remind people every day that what they're doing is incredible and valued."
The culture she describes is less about perks and more about purpose with company. "You want to work at a place that facilitates a culture that you know you're doing something meaningful" - and, she adds, where you actually like the people you do it with. The whole thing fits on a bumper sticker she'd probably approve of: "We're all in it together."
It's important to remind people every day that what they're doing is incredible and valued.
We're all in it together.
You want to work at a place that facilitates a culture that you know you're doing something meaningful.
The last five years have brought tremendous innovation to the transportation industry, but trailer technology has lagged.
Mullen's longer game points at autonomy. A driverless truck still drags a trailer, and that trailer will need to speak fluently to whatever is doing the driving. Drōv's answer is to keep the platform "open and agnostic" - not a walled garden, but a hub any fleet, manufacturer, or sensor maker can build on.
The bet is that the trailer's quiet decade of neglect is ending, and that the company which wired it up first gets to set the standard. Safety pays the bills today - fewer blowouts, fewer wheel-end fires, better fuel economy from tires kept at the right pressure. Autonomy is the horizon it's all pointed at.
It is also a market built on returns a fleet manager can put on a spreadsheet. A blowout on the interstate is a tow bill, a delivery missed, and a safety report nobody enjoys writing. A wheel-end fire is worse. Tires running at the right pressure simply burn less fuel, mile after mile, across a fleet of hundreds. Mullen's pitch never has to lean on novelty for its own sake - the trailer that reports for duty is also the trailer that costs less to run.
Make the trailer smart, make the data shareable, and be standing there with the standard when autonomous trucking finally needs a trailer that can keep up.
The Oklahoma-based venture firm closed a seed round into Drōv in January 2021 - fuel for testing and the run to commercial launch.