Selling into the waste management industry may be a $100 billion business in the U.S., but much of it still relies on pen, paper, and door-to-door sales. David Berg, founder and CEO of CommanderAI, saw that gap firsthand when he started his career as the first employee at Ohio-based Battle Motors, even spending time behind the wheel of a garbage truck.
Now, Berg’s startup CommanderAI has raised a $5 million seed round, led by 11 Tribes Ventures with participation from Watchfire Ventures, Gaingels, and Rad Fund, to bring modern CRM and sales prospecting to the sector.
While platforms like Salesforce and HubSpot can be tailored to waste management, Berg said they’re too complex and miss the industry’s nuances. Waste companies often sell to small businesses with little online presence or to new construction projects that aren’t widely advertised. CommanderAI’s AI pipeline scrapes and refines fragmented public data, turning it into actionable sales leads.
“Although that data is inherently available somewhere on the public web, to be able to segment it and actually repurpose it to where it’s useful took a lot of work,” Berg said. “That’s where the AI pipeline comes in.”
CommanderAI is currently finding traction with medical and hazardous waste management companies and is designed to scale from one-truck haulers to large enterprises. The company is especially targeting mid-to-large regional players, pitching itself as a tool to make sales teams more efficient rather than replacing them.
The seed funding will go toward building out features like mapping, marketing, and routing, as well as expanding the sales team.
“There are only around 10 active software providers in the entire industry,” Berg noted. “A lot of it was really just investor education, here’s who we’re selling to, here’s how they operate.”
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Looking ahead, CommanderAI plans to expand into adjacent industrial services like dumpster rentals and recycling. Berg’s longer-term goal: capture 30% of the waste management industry as customers.
