Vignan Velivela and the cost of standing still

A truck stop is an unusual place to continue an education in robotics. Vignan Velivela went anyway. He and his co-founders spent time at stops across California, talking to the people whose working days depended on fuel, vehicles and money arriving when it was supposed to. He had already worked on software for self-driving cars. Now the questions came from people doing the driving themselves.

There is an appealingly practical turn in that journey. Transportation attracts grand ambitions: autonomous vehicles, electric fleets, machines exploring other worlds. Velivela had worked close to those ambitions. At AtoB, the company he co-founded in 2019, he concentrated on something that could make an ordinary day on the road unnecessarily expensive. A truck might reach its destination long before the payment did.

His co-founders were Harshita Arora, who had developed a cryptocurrency price-tracking app, and Tushar Misra, who had worked at Uber. Their early business idea involved buses. The company subsequently changed direction toward financial tools for trucking. Visits to places including Stockton helped them understand the fuel-card business and the needs of the people using it. The route into payments ran through actual conversations.

Two degrees, one recurring question

Velivela grew up in India and studied at BITS Pilani, taking a dual programme in electronics engineering and economics. One discipline asks how a system works; the other keeps asking about incentives, costs and access. In his later career, both would have plenty to do. His final-year thesis at CSIR in New Delhi concerned sustainable energy technologies and science policy, subjects that required attention to technology and the conditions surrounding its use.

Before Carnegie Mellon, he co-founded Prajaloan in Bengaluru. The digital lending company built a peer-to-peer platform, working on identity verification, risk assessment, digital contracts and payments. Financial access was already a practical concern in his work. The steps between wanting to lend money and making lending usable were part of the product.

That background makes AtoB easier to understand. Financial technology was familiar territory before he entered the trucking business. So was the idea that a technical system should be judged by what it lets another person accomplish. A lending platform and a fleet card serve different customers, but each depends on whether the complicated work underneath produces something useful at the point of use.

A detour through the Moon

At Carnegie Mellon’s School of Computer Science, Velivela worked on CubeRover, a NASA-supported project led by robotics professor Red Whittaker. The work concerned a small rover for lunar exploration. His next professional stop was Cruise Automation, where he worked as an engineer on robotics software for self-driving cars. His interest in transportation had room for both a distant landscape and the streets of a city.

There was another strand, too. In 2015, he published research on small satellite constellations and internet access while a research intern at the Observer Research Foundation. His paper considered technological trends alongside regulation and business potential. A related essay, “Internet for All,” explored the gap between the internet’s growth and the people still beyond its reach.

Read together, these projects suggest a recurring question about access: what has to exist underneath a service before more people can use it? That is an interpretation of the work, rather than a claim that he had planned the whole route in advance. Careers rarely provide such tidy road markings. Still, a satellite connection, a lending platform and a payment network all demand attention to infrastructure that users may barely notice when it works.

“We want payments to be as reliable as the internet.”

Vignan Velivela, 2022

The invoice has its own timetable

Velivela has described slow payments as a “silent tax” on fleets. The phrase identifies a cost that can disappear into the background of running a business. The work is finished, but the money remains elsewhere. Meanwhile, another expense arrives on schedule. Fuel, repairs and wages have little interest in the administrative progress of an invoice.

His argument is that slower receipts increase the cost of working capital. A small operator may have to borrow to bridge the interval, squeezing a margin that already has other demands on it. Faster payment can therefore change more than the experience of checking an account. It can affect how much it costs to keep operating until the next job pays.

He has pointed to the gig economy as a useful comparison. Companies such as Uber and DoorDash made frequent driver payouts part of their businesses. Bringing similar speed to commercial transportation became one of AtoB’s aims. The company’s offering grew beyond a fuel card into tools for moving money and managing expenses. A driver’s day contains more transactions than the one at the pump.

The distinction is especially meaningful for someone coming from autonomous driving. A vehicle’s movement and its owner’s financial position belong to the same operating day. Improving one while overlooking the other leaves a substantial part of transportation untouched. Velivela’s change of focus brought the economics of keeping a vehicle working into the engineering conversation.

A card that knows where the truck is

In October 2026, Geotab launched a fleet card in collaboration with AtoB. The arrangement joins AtoB’s payment platform and fuel-discount network with Geotab’s vehicle data. It provides a concrete example of the business Velivela has been building: information about the physical vehicle can help determine what happens to the financial transaction.

The card stays locked until a driver unlocks it in the Geotab Drive app while the vehicle is parked at the merchant. When a purchase is attempted, the system checks the vehicle’s proximity, the merchant’s coordinates and the fuel level. A purchase can be declined if the vehicle is absent or the tank lacks room for the fuel. The receipt gets a little cross-examination before it exists.

The product also lets fleets review transactions and manage spending controls within Geotab’s platform. Its scope extends to other road expenses, including maintenance, tolls and parking. The link between operations and finance is the point: a fleet owner can use information from the vehicle to help manage the money spent on it.

It is a useful place to see the robotics background meet the payments background. Both involve decisions based on evidence from the world. Here, the decision concerns whether a purchase fits the circumstances of a truck. The outward object is still a card. Much of the interesting work happens behind it.

Growing through other people’s networks

AtoB participated in Y Combinator’s Summer 2020 batch. In 2022 it appeared on Forbes’ Next Billion-Dollar Startups list. Those milestones brought recognition to a business whose customers were often far from the usual technology-company spotlight. For Velivela, the driver conversations remained part of the explanation of what the company was trying to do.

In September 2024, AtoB announced $130 million in combined Series C equity and debt funding. General Catalyst and Bloomberg Beta led the round, with Mastercard participating. The distinction between debt and equity matters: the headline amount describes a financing package for the company. It is one dated milestone in the business’s development.

Partnerships became another route to customers. AtoB worked with Uber Freight on a co-branded card, and in June 2025 announced a fuel-card partnership with Nolan Transportation Group. The October 2026 Geotab launch carried the approach into a vehicle-data platform. Each arrangement brings financial tools into relationships that transportation businesses already use.

Velivela’s ambitions also reached back toward India. In January 2025, he discussed plans for a Bengaluru research and development centre. In a separate interview looking ahead to that year, he described further work on FuelMap and a digital wallet, alongside deeper partnerships. The emphasis was on simplifying operations and improving cash flow. Those are useful standards against which to judge the more expansive language that tends to accompany a funding round.

Kindness, cleverness and a very large tree

Velivela’s public profile has room for a less transactional set of interests. He has trekked the Valley of Flowers in the Himalayas and expressed a wish to cycle the Great Allegheny Passage. He lists himself as a life member of the Explorers Club. On his personal website, a photograph shows him standing beside an enormous tree. It is an effective reminder that some things will dwarf the founder in any photograph.

A colleague’s account adds another detail. Michael Brown, announcing his arrival at AtoB as chief business officer, recalled meals and cups of tea with Velivela and described him as deeply empathetic. That is Brown’s assessment, and it gives a personal dimension to a business story built around understanding other people’s working lives.

Velivela’s own Y Combinator biography includes a reminder: “Choose kindness then cleverness.” It is a compact instruction for someone with ample opportunities to exercise the second quality. The biography also makes room for fun. An infrastructure company can require serious engineering without requiring its founder to sound like a piece of infrastructure.

The questions that brought him to trucking remain everyday ones. Can the driver buy what the vehicle needs? Can the owner understand and control the expense? Can payment arrive in time to fund the next stretch of work? After lunar robotics and self-driving software, Velivela has put his attention on those questions. The destination is familiar enough: a business that can afford to keep moving.