Michael
MarmoThe scale-house kid who wrote the software.

A software company that smells like a transfer station

CurbWaste is the software layer for the American waste hauling business, which turns out to be a very large and unmodernized thing. Roughly 150 independent haulers across 40 states use CurbWaste to dispatch drivers, print scale tickets, run routes, invoice customers, and figure out - with growing help from a data warehouse and, more recently, some AI - whether any of it is actually making money. The company charges roughly $250 to $300 per driver per month. It has 55 or so employees, depending on the day. It has raised about $50 million. In October 2025 it closed a $28 million Series B led by Socium Ventures, which is the venture arm backed by Cox Enterprises, alongside Flourish Ventures, TTV Capital, B Capital Group and a newcomer called Squarepoint.

The CEO is Michael Marmo, who is a rare kind of founder in that when he tells you what a scale ticket is, he is not reading it off a slide. He has printed a scale ticket. He has weighed the truck, weighed the truck again on the way out, done the math with a pencil, and handed the paper to the driver. That is the story of CurbWaste, more or less: a founder wrote down a job he was already doing, and then a lot of other people who do the same job decided they wanted his version of it.

Fourth-generation trash, first-generation SaaS

Marmo's great-grandfather was in the waste business. His family ran a transfer station in New York, which is the industrial-sized version of the place where the garbage truck goes after it leaves your curb. As a young man he wanted to do something else, and he did - he studied at Quinnipiac University, played baseball for the Bobcats, and briefly went into advertising and media. Then he took what was supposed to be a temporary summer job at the family scale house. He stayed four years.

This is the sort of biographical detail that is usually skipped over in Series B press coverage in favor of numbers and TAM slides. It matters because it explains the specific texture of CurbWaste - the reason it has the features it has, in the order it has them, and the reason competitors keep losing bids to a company that at Series B is not the biggest waste-tech player in the market. When Marmo describes what happens at 4:30 in the morning inside a hauling business, he is describing something he watched.

I want the world to recognize those who pick up their trash. It's an extremely difficult and dangerous business. - Marmo, Authority Magazine

He sold the trash company to keep the software

In 2016 Marmo founded Curbside, a construction-and-demolition hauler in New York City. The name is important: it is essentially the same word as CurbWaste, and the near-identity between the two is not a branding accident. Curbside was where he built the software. He wired up a digital order form in 2016. He funded serious internal tooling in 2018. In 2019 he pushed live ETA, digital payments and a customer portal - the kind of interface a hauling customer expects and, at the time, mostly could not have. Then COVID happened, everything about waste got harder, and other hauling companies started calling.

The pivot was elegant in the way founder pivots usually aren't. Marmo could sell software to his competitors, or he could compete with them; doing both was a distraction and slightly a conflict of interest. In 2021 he sold Curbside to Cogent Waste Services. The software - now CurbWaste - would sell to everyone. This is the sort of decision that reads clean in a paragraph and, in the actual moment, is not clean at all. You are giving up a real cash-flowing operating business in a durable industry for the more speculative version of yourself.

A software business that sounds like a service business

Marmo tends to describe CurbWaste in a way that would irritate a lot of B2B software founders. He talks about the customer more than the product. He uses the phrase "we're not a grow-at-all-costs business" without any of the usual defensive framing. He says, plainly, "we're asking companies to trust us with their business, and I take that very seriously." This is not marketing - it is a strategic constraint. Waste haulers do not tolerate downtime. If dispatch breaks at 5 a.m. because the vendor pushed a bad release, drivers sit in the yard and the whole day is upside down. A founder who has personally watched that happen writes software differently than a founder who has not.

The other constraint is the shape of the customer. CurbWaste's typical account runs five to 200 trucks. These are family businesses. Some of them still print invoices on carbon triplicate. Sales cycles involve trust more than they involve ROI decks. Which is why Marmo's biography is not marketing - it is credential. He can walk into a hauler's office in Ohio or Texas and be, verifiably, one of them.

We're not a grow-at-all-costs business. We're asking companies to trust us with their business, and I take that very seriously. - Marmo, Waste Dive

Recycling can't scale on paper tickets

The polite version of the CurbWaste pitch is "operating software for haulers." The interesting version is that the circular economy - the recycling-and-reuse system that a lot of large companies and cities now say they want - runs on the same underlying infrastructure as the trash industry. Dispatch. Weights. Routes. Billing. Compliance. You cannot recover materials at meaningful scale if the person driving the truck is being routed by a whiteboard and a phone call. Marmo has spent several interviews making a version of this argument, most recently on Earth911's Sustainability In Your Ear.

That argument may sound abstract for a company whose day-to-day product is dispatch software. But it is the reason a corporate parent like Cox Enterprises writes a Series B check into a waste business. It is not a bet on hauling. It is a bet on a data layer that other businesses - materials recovery, chain-of-custody reporting, ESG accounting - will eventually need to build on top of.

How to get here

Baseball, failure, and other transferable skills

Marmo credits baseball for his even temperament as a founder, which is a slightly cliched thing to say but which he says in a specific way. Baseball, he points out, is a sport built around handling failure - a hitter who fails seven times out of ten is a Hall of Famer. Founders who cannot get comfortable with that ratio tend not to last. He says his biggest early mistake as a founder was assuming customers would want what his team built, because he ran a waste company. He learned to spend months, at times, restructuring a customer's operations before rolling out software. That is not a normal SaaS motion. It is closer to how a consulting firm sells.

Anybody that's in this industry, they go through a lot. I don't think anybody understands how hard it is. When you provide good service, you can win. - Marmo, Waste Dive

40 Under 40, quietly

In 2026 Waste360 named Marmo to its 40 Under 40 class and gave him the Innovator Award, which inside the industry is a real thing and outside the industry is entirely invisible. That gap - the industry knows, the tech press doesn't - is arguably the CurbWaste thesis in one sentence. Legacy industries have huge software opportunities precisely because the outside world has stopped paying attention to them. The founder who is willing to spend a career inside the yard, rather than adjacent to it, gets to define the operating system.

The data layer nobody built yet

The Series B thesis, as Marmo tells it, has three moving parts. One: the independent hauler market is enormous, fragmented, and under-tooled. Two: those haulers are the last mile of the circular economy, whether they think of themselves that way or not. Three: modern software plus modern data plus, increasingly, AI, unlocks a set of workflow improvements - route density, invoice speed, DSO reduction - that pay for the software many times over. CurbWaste says the cash-flow lift from automating payments alone runs 10 to 20 percent for a typical hauler.

None of this is glamorous. That is more or less the point. The software Marmo is building looks, from the outside, like a spreadsheet with a login. From inside a hauling business, it looks like the difference between staying independent and getting rolled up by a national. There is a version of the next decade in which CurbWaste is the operating system a couple of thousand family hauling businesses use to survive as software eats their industry from underneath them. Marmo would be very comfortable with that version.

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