He left a comfortable seat at one of software's hottest companies to write code for the people who empty your dumpster. It turned out to be the smartest unglamorous bet in tech.
Mark Hoadley runs a company that watches your garbage get picked up. Cameras on the side of a truck confirm the bin was emptied, flag the one that was missed, and quietly note the customer who has been throwing in twice what they pay for. That is Hauler Hero in 2026 - and it is the kind of detail that explains why Hoadley is interesting before any of the usual founder biography does.
He is the co-founder and CEO of Hauler Hero, a vertical software company building the modern operating system for waste and recycling haulers: dispatch, routing, billing, customer portals, and now a roster of AI agents. The work is deeply unsexy by design. While the rest of the venture world stampeded toward chatbots and image generators, Hoadley raised a $16 million Series A, led by Frontier Growth, to put artificial intelligence inside garbage trucks.
The pitch is simple and a little subversive: the most overlooked industries make the best software companies, because nobody good is competing for them. Hauler Hero now serves more than 200 hauling companies whose trucks reach close to a million homes and businesses. The platform has helped move roughly 35 million pickups since 2020. None of it trends on social media. All of it has to happen, every single day, rain or shine.
"The trash must get picked up." It is the closest thing Hauler Hero has to a company motto, and it doubles as a product philosophy: software that cannot afford to be down.
"All of the existing software in the space, they were clunky, old." Some of it, he has said, reminded him of the Oregon Trail - or the brick cell phone from the movie Wall Street.
The insight did not come from Hoadley. It came from his brother-in-law, Ben Sikma, who was doing mergers and acquisitions in the waste sector and kept opening the hood on companies that were changing hands for real money. Inside, he found software that looked like it had stopped getting updates around the time of dial-up. Decades-old systems were quietly running multimillion-dollar operations.
Hoadley had the other half of the puzzle. He had spent nearly four years at ServiceTitan, the software company that did for HVAC and plumbing contractors exactly what waste needed: turned a clipboard-and-phone trade into something running on a clean, modern platform. He had risen from a top sales rep to a director overseeing strategic accounts. He had watched, up close, how a vertical software company is actually built - including ServiceTitan's hard lesson that breaking into a new trade sometimes means buying your way in rather than bolting it on.
So in 2020 the two of them started Hauler Hero. Hoadley took CEO; Sikma took the business side. They did not build a tidy minimum viable product and wait for feedback. They built several product lines at once, betting that a hauler needs the whole system - dispatch and billing and routing together - or it is not worth switching for. It is an expensive, contrarian way to start. It is also how you earn an industry that has been burned by half-finished tools before.
"Think of it as like running a factory with no roof and no visibility." That is how he describes the old way - and the gap his company decided to fill.
Silicon Valley spent two decades ignoring waste. That neglect is the moat. A modern platform here doesn't fight ten well-funded rivals - it replaces a fax machine.
Trash is non-optional infrastructure. The revenue is sticky because the work is relentless: every route, every day, regardless of the news cycle.
Cameras and a clean data model turn each pickup into a record. Confirm service, verify billing, catch the missed bin - visibility where there used to be none.
Most of the Series A is going here - building software that does the parts of the job a small hauler can never quite staff for.
Spots service issues and hidden revenue from truck-camera footage - the bin that was missed, the customer overfilling.
Handles the flood of customer inquiries so a five-person back office can answer like a fifty-person one.
Optimizes and reroutes collection runs for efficiency - the difference between a profitable route and a losing one.
From a $10M seed in 2024 to a $16M Series A two years later, with execs from Gusto and ServiceTitan among the early believers. The money keeps following the unglamorous bet.
"The ones that are getting more opportunity are the ones that are leaning into AI and have some kind of moat in an AI world."
- On why a clean system of record matters now
"We're going to continue to chart the course for the next decade."
Sources: TechCrunch, San Diego Business Journal, Waste Advantage Magazine, Business of San Diego, and Hauler Hero. Figures reflect public reporting as of mid-2026 and may have changed.