Introducing Coast — a powerful commercial charge card for modern fleet businesses

Hi — I’m Daniel, and today, I’m excited to announce the launch of Coast, a new payments solution that enables transparency and control for businesses that operate vehicle fleets.

Until now, the company has been in stealth while we’ve assembled a world-class team to build charge card for fleet and fuel that can be used anywhere that accepts Visa. With the Coast card, fleet operators will have the control, security, and visibility they need to grow faster, with confidence. Coast will launch later this year and has begun accepting customers onto its waitlist at coastpay.com.

We started this business at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, when logistics and mobile workforces, essential workers at the front lines keeping the economy functioning, were under massive strain. These “real world” business employees — truck drivers, plumbers, HVAC installers, last-mile deliverypeople — are sometimes overlooked by the technology industry. But they are the hidden force that powers the digital age, making possible every Amazon shipment or Shopify purchase, every DoorDash delivery or Uber ride. As our society demanded more and more of these workers during the pandemic, their community’s needs and pain points became even more apparent to us.

We set out to build a business that would improve the working lives of mobile workforces while helping their employers’ businesses thrive. When we looked at the last decade in fintech, we observed so much product innovation and the development of low- or no-cost financial services for consumers and for some businesses, like tech startups. But the fleets segment, vast and vital to our economy, remains underserved. It deserves better.

The need for visibility in commercial fleets: a bit of background

In recent years, companies like Ramp, Brex, Divvy, and others have emerged to provide easier ways for companies to allow their employees to pay for job-related expenses through corporate cards. But if you run a business that operates vehicles — which could be in the trucking industry, but also could be a business of plumbers, landscape crews, school bus drivers, HVAC installers, or one of the many, many other industries that operate the 500K+ commercial fleets in the US — you have different, specialized needs. You don’t want or need to give your employees general-use corporate cards when the primary employee expenses relate exclusively to the vehicle, such as maintenance, roadside assistance, and — most importantly — buying gas. And you need controls to authorize only approved transactions: for instance, to buy gas for the company van and not a personal car, and to fill up at the pump and not to make other purchases in the gas station convenience store.

Over the years, a handful of specialized businesses have emerged to fill that gap with payments solutions tailored for the fleets vertical. These companies put additional control, security, and visibility into the hands of fleet owners and managers. They allow those managers to set controls, like restricting purchases to only fuel products of a particular grade or tracking expenses on a per-vehicle basis.

The fleet fuel payments on these specialized cards add up to a staggering $120 billion annually in the US. But the market is dominated by three incumbents, valued at over $40 billion combined, that no longer prioritize the evolving demands of fleet operators. Customers frequently complain of products that are disconnected from their needs, fail to deliver improved technology, and — most egregiously — charge hidden fees that seek to extract every possible dollar from the user, despite the incumbents’ already-high margins and billions in revenues. The lack of innovation in the space has led to:

• Difficult-to-use payment products: Customers complain that existing solutions are painful for both the employee and the fleet manager. Many existing fleet cards operate on proprietary, closed-loop networks built by the incumbents, so drivers waste valuable time — time that they could otherwise spend getting to their next job — looking for a gas station that accepts their business’s fuel card and entering all sorts of identification information at the fuel pump required to authorize the transaction up front. Manager software is also difficult to navigate. Fleets need payments products that are intuitive and easy to use.
• Siloed and segregated payment data: Without simple and intuitive connection of payments into their accounting platforms, expense reporting, vehicle telematics, and fleet software, fleets struggle to understand and manage their spend and are unable to get clear, actionable insights about their businesses. Fleets need their employee and vehicle payments seamlessly integrated into the rest of their operations.
• Bloated cost structures with hidden fees and difficult-to-understand terms: Incumbent product offerings are often riddled with expensive hidden fees and hard-to-understand terms. They look nothing like the products of modern fintech businesses that have pioneered fairness and transparency for consumers and venture capital-backed startups. Hidden fees that can add up to many thousands of dollars for small businesses have been par for the course in fleet payments, compounded by the fact that incumbents have failed to deliver innovations in their products. Fleets need fair and transparent financial products.

Enter Coast.

We have built a new charge card — one that is fair and transparent, and provides a best-in-class experience to mobile fleet workers as well as fleet owners and managers. Coast’s innovative software platform enables fleets to run their businesses with control, security, and visibility.

The new fleet payments

Coast has developed a modern platform for fleet and fuel payments that better serves the needs of today’s fleets.

• Greater convenience: Coast is a simple and easy-to-use charge card that works anywhere Visa is accepted, benefiting fleet owners and drivers by allowing them to efficiently fill up their vehicles wherever their work takes them. The driver uses the Coast card to pay for purchases at gas stations and other vehicle-related merchants throughout the month. The fleet manager then pays the statement in full at the end of the period, just like an American Express charge card.
• Better data: Coast gives fleets clear reporting and visibility by capturing detailed, line-item-level transaction data for gas station purchases and matches it within the Coast platform to specific vehicles and drivers. Using the software that Coast is developing, managers will be able to take that data and connect it with their business’s vehicle telematics, accounting systems, and ERPs for further actionable business insights.
• Better control: At the same time, Coast provides the granular controls that fleets need. Fleet businesses can restrict purchases to only fuel or particular categories of merchants. They can also apply different policies to particular people or vehicles to detect and avoid unauthorized charges and wasteful spending.
• Fair and transparent pricing: Coast offers simple subscription pricing. Coast’s early customers will pay a flat, monthly price: $2 per month per employee who uses the cards to make payments that month. We don’t charge per-gallon administration fees, per-transaction fees, electronic payments fees, phone payment fees, check processing fees, low gas price surcharges, inactive card fees, reporting fees, minimum administration fees, or portal access fees. We don’t charge excessive late fees. Those kinds of fees don’t serve the long-term needs of growing businesses or their workforces. So we’ve done away with them at Coast. And on top of that, we offer a simple 1¢ rebate to the customer for every gallon that they buy. You can find more information about our pricing at https://coastpay.com/pricing/.

Here’s what that means for a fleet business: an owner of a small HVAC business with a fleet of drivers, for example, can now use Coast to distribute charge cards to her employees so they can fuel up wherever they happen to be on the road — not just at gas stations that accept a specialized payment type — and focus on serving their customers . Through Coast’s spend management software platform, accessible anywhere, the business owner can set controls and get up-to-the-second visibility into each driver and vehicle — who is buying, what they are buying, and where they are buying it. She can focus on growing her business without worrying about unauthorized charges or incurring the expensive hidden fees that are charged by other solutions.

Coast’s mission is to be the financial platform for the future of transportation

Today, Coast helps facilitate the purchase of diesel gas that fuels an internal combustion engine. But with developments in alternative vehicle energy, tomorrow we will be powering the transaction that charges an electric vehicle battery that gets the plumber to his job or the package delivery driver to her destination. Coast’s team is driven to enable the people that power these businesses, whatever form their mobility or energy source takes. We’re excited to build a business that’s designed for the future of mobility.

The road ahead

We’ve raised a $6 million seed round from an incredible group. Sheel Mohnot from Better Tomorrow Ventures led the round and has joined Coast’s board. Also joining the round is an array of top investors: Avid Ventures, Bessemer Venture Partners, BoxGroup, Colle, Foundation Capital, Greycroft, and Max Levchin’s SciFi VC, as well as more than a dozen angels including founders of Plaid, Flexport, Affirm, Marqeta, Bread, Albert, Addi, Lithic, and other fintech and logistics startups.

This isn’t my first company: I previously co-founded and built Bread, a consumer buy-now-pay-later solution, which exited last year. I’m excited to bring the same ease of use and transparency that Bread brought to e-commerce consumers and retailers to a new category of businesses and employees that is less well served by fintech. And I’m happy to have Andrew Woolf as my co-founder. Andrew was previously an operations executive at Lyft and knows all too well the challenges that commercial drivers face.

We have an elite fintech team in product and technology, almost each of whom has been building world-class financial services products for at least 15–20 years. And on the business side, we have folks with years of experience from big banks and established charge card platforms like American Express and Discover. It’s an experienced and sophisticated team that is motivated to tackle a pretty ambitious mission.

This is an exciting first step on a long journey to build a transformational company committed to delivering honest and innovative financial technology products that help businesses thrive.

We’re Coast, and we’re happy to meet and serve you!