He left the world of theoretical physics and private-equity spreadsheets to put electric trucks on the highway - and to prove the cleaner truck is also the cheaper one.
Most people meet a diesel truck and see a diesel truck. Sami Khan sees a spreadsheet with the wrong assumptions baked in. He runs Nevoya, an all-electric freight carrier he co-founded in 2022, and the entire company is built around a single contrarian wager: that an electric truck, routed and charged intelligently, can quietly beat a diesel one on the only scoreboard a shipper actually reads - the invoice.
That is the pitch he gives Fortune 500 logistics teams, and the reason they pick up the phone. Nevoya does not sell trucks or charging hardware or software licenses. It moves freight. The trucks are Freightliner eCascadias, the drivers are Nevoya's, the charging is Nevoya's problem, and the customer's loading dock looks exactly the same as it did the week before. "There is no difference to your business," Khan says, "because we take care of the charging. We have the drivers. We have the trucks." The disruption is invisible by design.
Underneath that boring-on-purpose promise sits the part Khan actually gets animated about: a proprietary, AI-powered Transportation Management System built from scratch for the quirks of running electric vehicles at freight scale. Diesel logistics software assumes a truck refuels in five minutes anywhere there is a pump. Electric freight does not work that way. Range, charging windows, battery degradation, time-of-use electricity pricing, and route topology all braid together into a planning problem that punishes guesswork. Nevoya's TMS handles the orchestration - predictive charging, route optimization, real-time emissions and cost analytics - turning the very complexity that scares incumbents into the company's edge.
We don't just move freight - we embed ourselves in our customers' operations, uncovering insights that others miss.Sami Khan, Co-Founder & CEO, Nevoya
Khan is allergic to clean-tech overpromising, which makes him an unusually trustworthy narrator of his own industry. Ask him about long-haul electric trucking and he will tell you, flatly, that diesel should keep doing that job for now. His interest is narrower and sharper: roughly half of all freight in the United States moves under 250 miles, which happens to be the comfortable range of the electric trucks already on the market. "These are the use cases that EVs were born to serve," he says. He is not trying to electrify everything. He is trying to electrify the part that already pencils out, and let the math do the evangelism.
That instinct for puncturing hype with a number shows up everywhere. When customers raise the specter of battery fires, Khan reaches for the comparison most people never hear: diesel trucks catch fire at roughly twenty times the rate of electric vehicles. When investors ask how he will pay for an expensive fleet, he reaches back into his private-equity training and finances the trucks with debt rather than equity - treating each truck as a leverageable asset, not a line item that dilutes the company. The fundraising headlines get the attention; the balance-sheet discipline is what makes the model survivable.
Figures as cited by Sami Khan in interviews on EV trucking economics.
Khan did not grow up in trucking, and that is rather the point. He trained as a theoretical physicist at the University of Cambridge, finishing a Master of Mathematics in theoretical and mathematical physics in 2014 on top of an astrophysics background. Physics teaches a particular kind of stubbornness: the belief that a messy system, looked at correctly, is governed by a few clean rules. He has been applying that belief to freight ever since.
The detour through money came first. Khan spent roughly half a decade around private equity, including a stint at Montagu Private Equity, and did a turn in consulting at Accenture, where he was a lead analyst on a sprawling digital-transformation programme for one of Britain's largest banks. Finance gave him the vocabulary of capital and risk that now shapes how Nevoya buys trucks. But the part that wired his brain for this company was the four years he spent at McLaren's applied-technology arm, swimming in electric drivetrains, optimization engines, and predictive maintenance. Racing teams are obsessive about extracting performance from electrons and data. Khan took that obsession and pointed it at a cargo trailer.
They want to decarbonize so badly that they are willing to pay a premium. We have not failed there once - as soon as you say you have electric vehicles, they pick up the phone.Sami Khan, on Fortune 500 demand
He launched Nevoya in Los Angeles, and he is unsentimental about why. "It's the best place in the country" for electric trucks, he says, because "the incentives are the strongest." Strategy, not zip-code loyalty. The plan from there is a corridor expansion - Texas next - building a zero-emissions network lane by lane rather than trying to boil the national freight ocean at once.
The traction arrived fast enough to make the thesis hard to dismiss. Within about six months of operating, Nevoya had onboarded Fortune 500 customers and leading third-party logistics providers. In November 2024 the company closed an initial $3 million seed round led by Third Sphere and RedBlue Capital. By July 2025 it had raised a $9.3 million seed led by Lowercarbon Capital, with Floating Point, LMNT Ventures, and existing backers piling in. Lowercarbon's Shawn Xu summed up the bet in the language Khan himself prefers - economics first, virtue second: "Nevoya is an AI-orchestrated, electric-first freight carrier that's already outperforming legacy diesel trucking economics, and we're betting they'll scale faster too."
That is the whole Khan trick, really. He has wrapped a climate mission inside a better business, so the customer never has to choose between the two. The greener truck shows up cheaper and more reliable, and the decarbonization happens almost as a side effect of a sound procurement decision. "The size of the pie, and the opportunity, is so, so huge," he says - and for once the founder superlative is just describing the freight market.
Diesel trucks catch fire at roughly twenty times the rate of electric vehicles. The scary headline is pointed the wrong way.
Half of freight never travels that far. Today's electric trucks already cover the most common job on the board.
Nevoya owns the trucks, drivers, and charging. The shipper's operation does not change at all.
Khan did not build Nevoya alone, and the co-founders he recruited say something about the seriousness of the bet. The team pairs his physics-and-finance brain with deep operating and autonomy pedigree.
Cambridge physicist, ex-McLaren Applied and private equity. The economics-first evangelist for electric freight.
Built a predictive-analytics startup acquired by Project44, then spent two years there on route optimization and infrastructure planning.
Led business development and commercial partnerships at Waymo before bringing that autonomy-era commercial chops to freight.
The size of the pie, and the opportunity, is so, so huge.- Sami Khan on the freight market he is trying to electrify
He was doing theoretical and mathematical physics at Cambridge before he ever thought about a cargo trailer. The equations stayed; the subject changed.
Four years inside McLaren's applied arm taught him to wring performance out of electrons and data - racing-grade habits, freight-grade application.
He finances trucks with debt, not equity, a move straight out of his private-equity playbook that keeps the cap table clean.
Nevoya's fleet is exclusively Freightliner eCascadias - no diesel anywhere, no retrofits, electric from the ground up.
Among the angels betting on him is Qasir Younis, founder and CEO of Applied Intuition - autonomy-world money on a freight-world founder.