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  Overview poster.

Inspiration

Last week I went to the Broker-Carrier Summit in Kansas. Four days, every size of trucking company in the country in one room, and the same problem on every panel: driver retention. The largest carriers and the smallest carriers said the same thing. They can't find the right drivers, they can't keep them, and there's no job board built for this industry.

I grew up in trucking. My father runs a 4 reefer freight operation in Fresno. My cousin runs a 60-truck fleet in Winnipeg. I've heard about this problem my whole life. But it wasn't until Kansas that I actually looked at the numbers:

• 90% turnover at large carriers
• 70% of drivers quit within their first year
• $2 billion+ lost to driver turnover every year
• $4,000 to $7,000 to onboard a single driver
• More than 200,000 new CDLs issued in the US every year

It's not a driver shortage. It's a retention crisis. And it falls hardest on the people who built American trucking. Punjabi, Sikh, and African American drivers consistently report being paid less, hired slower, and overlooked because of language and visibility gaps. As the ATA's chief economist said: "What we have is a quality problem around drivers, much more so than an absolute number."

That's what Nocti is closing.

What it does

Nocti is a voice AI that talks to truck drivers and matches them to carriers who actually fit.

For drivers: Call our number. Talk to Nocti in your language for 8 minutes. Answer questions about your experience, equipment, lanes, current pay, and what really matters in this industry, how often you want to be home. At the end, Nocti tells you what drivers like you are actually being paid in your area, sourced from government data, live job postings, and our growing dataset.

No app. No web form. No resume. Just a phone call drivers are already used to making.

For carriers: A dashboard where you search drivers in plain English. Gemini ranks every driver by compatibility against your operation and explains why each one is a fit. No more Facebook ads. No more recruiter spam. No more onboarding drivers who churn out in six months.

How we built it

Layer	Tool	Why
Voice orchestration	Vapi	Sub-700ms latency for natural conversation
Voice (TTS)	ElevenLabs Flash v2.5	Drivers won't trust a robot. Warmth keeps them on the call.
Speech-to-text	Deepgram Nova-3	Real-time accuracy with custom trucking-jargon boosts
Driver conversation	Anthropic Claude Sonnet	Adapts examples in real time across 4 experience tiers
Carrier-side reasoning	Google Gemini API	Natural-language search and match explanations
Backend	Bun + TypeScript + Postgres	Fast modern stack
Hosting	Vultr	One-click deploy for the webhook receiver and benchmark API

Driver calls run as a single Vapi Assistant. Adaptive, not gated. Vapi's analysis plan extracts a 6-domain, 30-field structured JSON object per call (identity, experience, current job, preferences, intent, consent) and writes it to Postgres via webhook. The carrier dashboard queries Postgres and uses Gemini to rank, score, and explain matches.

The benchmark dataset is hand-curated from BLS wage data, live Indeed and ZipRecruiter postings, our family network's ground-truth in the Central Valley, and self-collected from real Nocti calls. Every source is citable.

Challenges we ran into

Voice trust. The hardest problem in this product isn't technical. It's getting a trucker to spend 8 minutes talking to an AI. We tested three voices with drivers in Sacramento. Two were rejected within 30 seconds. The third, our ElevenLabs voice, kept drivers on the line for the full call.

Adaptive prompting without sounding scripted. A 2-year driver and a 20-year veteran want completely different things. Nocti has four tailored example tracks and calibrates within the first 90 seconds of every call.

Building a market-rate dataset in 36 hours. There is no public, current, equipment-and-region-specific pay benchmark for US drivers. We built one from BLS, scraped postings, and our family network. Every number citable.

Earning the truck-stop conversation. We went to a Sacramento truck stop and asked drivers to call an AI on their break. The breakthrough was leading with the question, "Do you actually know what you're worth?", instead of leading with the product. Drivers wanted to talk once we framed it that way.

Accomplishments we're proud of

• 20 deep driver interviews this weekend
• 30+ drivers spoken with at the Sacramento truck stop
• End-to-end pipeline live: voice, transcript, structured database, carrier match
• Carrier dashboard fully built with natural-language search and ranked compatibility scoring
• Founder-market fit validated externally. The lead founder's prior trucking startup, Nocteam, won the PLASMA accelerator one week ago

What we learned

We started thinking we were solving a labor shortage. We finished knowing we're solving an information crisis.

Drivers don't quit for more money. They quit because they have no visibility into their own market value, into which carriers would actually respect them, into where they'll be next week. Home time matters more than pay in this industry, and trucking runs on a spot market with no contracts, so drivers genuinely don't know where they'll be from one week to the next. That's an unbearable life when you're also being underpaid relative to the driver parked next to you.

The communities most failed by this gap are the ones who built American trucking. Punjabi, Sikh, and African American drivers told us in their own words: same hours, same equipment, less pay. Voice-first wasn't an aesthetic choice. It was the only way to reach a workforce that's voice-native, time-poor, and disproportionately ESL.

What's next

• Beachhead in the Central Valley and Punjabi corridor (Fresno, Bay Area, Surrey, Brampton)
• Multilingual support in Punjabi, Spanish, and Hindi
• Vetting integrations: PSP, MVR, FMCSA Drug & Alcohol Clearinghouse, leading to a paid Verified Driver tier
• Driver retention app. Large carriers struggle to check in with their drivers. Nocti becomes the always-on AI assistant that surfaces driver sentiment, preferences, and red flags in real time so a human can step in before the driver leaves.
• The data flywheel. Every Nocti call adds to what becomes the most accurate market-rate dataset in trucking.
• Long-term: AI Truck OS for the 91.5% of US carriers running 10 trucks or fewer.

Built With

• ai-structured-outputs
• anthropic-claude-sonnet
• apify-apis
• asynchronous-frontend-communication
• crud-systems
• data-extraction
• deepgram-nova-3
• elevenlabs
• frontend-backend-integration
• google-gemini-api
• json-apis
• matching-algorithms
• ngrok-networking
• nlp-style-classification
• python-backend-architecture
• vapi
• vultr