Intact spent close to ten years trying to build commercial telematics integration in-house. It never worked. Last week Intact’s investment arm wrote a cheque into the Toronto startup that solved it, a company it had already been buying from as a customer.

Terminal closed $20M USD ($28.2M CAD) on July 29, led by Battery Ventures. Penske Transportation Solutions and Intact Private Capital came in as strategic investors. YC and Wayfinder followed on. Marcus Ryu, who co-founded Guidewire and ran it as CEO, took the board seat. Terminal says the valuation is up 5x from the $3.1M USD seed Golden Ventures led in 2023. The company raised this round with a lean team that included only one salesperson.

Raghav Midha and Connor Giles started Terminal out of YC in 2023 to fix something nobody wants to own: fleet telematics data lives across hundreds of different devices, each with its own format, permissions, and failure modes. An insurer can’t build 300 integrations and then maintain them forever. So the data mostly sat there.

Terminal now supports 325+ telematics service providers, processes about two terabytes a day, and has taken in more than five billion kilometres of historical driving data. Terminal says telematics data is three times more predictive of future risk than any other underwriting variable but prior to Terminal was hard to access due to industry fragmentation. Most customers now come to Terminal inbound.

Three years from founding to Series A is about average but Terminal focused on building a business built to scale without breaking. Most seed-stage companies hit a first wave of demand and immediately hire two AEs. Terminal focused on building their product. Companies will never buy 40% of an integration layer. This focus was evident as they hired a COO before a CMO. Now they are ready to scale and the $20M is the fuel for the fire.

Which startups should focus on product vs marketing?

Terminal had something most companies don’t: a market where fragmentation was the moat and nobody was racing them to it. Insurers move slowly. Telematics hardware vendors weren’t going to build a neutral layer that commoditized them. Terminal got years of quiet because the category granted it.

If you’re building where distribution is the moat, consumer, prosumer AI, anything with low switching costs, sequencing product-first will lose you the market while you polish. The question isn’t "should I build the foundation first." It’s "what’s the actual clock in my category, and how much of it do I have left?"

Get that wrong in either direction and you’re finished. Overbuild and someone owns the channel. Underbuild and you scale a product that breaks at 10x, which is worse than not scaling at all.

Terminal read their clock correctly. Most companies don’t. That’s the skill. The patience was the output.

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