How a young fleet owner from Madhya Pradesh built a tool that could change the way India’s trucking industry thinks about money.
Mr. Sumedh Singh Sharma, Director of the Ujjain-based MS Capital Logistic Solutions, did not plan to be a transporter. His father was a C&F agent — a business he found too passive. But when a top official of UltraTech Cement’s logistics gave him an opportunity, he grabbed it with both hands. For six months, he simply learned. Watched. Absorbed. Then, in May 2021, he bought his first truck. Within three years, it had grown to 117 — operating across seven UltraTech plants across India. On paper, a remarkable success. In reality, the cracks were already forming.
When the Numbers Stopped Adding Up
UltraTech’s payment cycles were reliable — that was never the problem. The problem was that he was running his business the way most transporters do: on instinct and cash flow, assuming that money coming in meant the business was doing well. It was not. When payment delays began and working capital dried up, he looked deeper. What he found was sobering — profitable in only two of seven plants. The other five were bleeding money silently, every single day.
The Excel Sheet That Changed Everything
His response was methodical. He listed every expense — fuel, tyres, tolls, insurance, depreciation, accident costs, even bribes — and built a cost-per-km trip sheet from six years of dispatch data. The results were brutal. He could see, trip by trip, exactly where he was losing money. He asked UltraTech for better rates. When that failed, he made the hardest decision of his young business life — pulling back from 117 trucks across seven plants to the profitable ones.
Confident in his new approach, he decided to expand into Odisha and Chhattisgarh. What awaited him was a masterclass in transport’s brutal realities. Established players sabotaged his operations — drivers abandoned vehicles, diesel and batteries went missing. Expenses hit Rs 15 lakh a day. The fleet shrank from 117 to 43.
The Idea Born from the Ashes
Sitting with 43 trucks on near-autopilot, he could not stop thinking about one problem — millions of India’s truck owners had no idea whether they were actually making money. They knew their freight rates and EMIs. But the full picture — tyres, depreciation, turnaround time, accident costs — remained invisible. That realisation became the seed of something new.
The Tool That Thinks Like a Transporter
On August 2nd this year, Mr. Sharma put that realisation to work. Using an AI tool to build a front-end interface, he developed NEXUS AI Transport’s trip cost calculator — https://nexus-transport-phi.vercel.app — a free, web-based tool that lets any fleet owner instantly see whether a trip is profitable, loss-making, or breaking even.
“It tells you what you need to earn before you buy a truck. If your EMI is ₹ 1 lakh, a freight of ₹ 1,000 per tonne won’t work. If it is ₹ 40,000, that same rate can carry you. You don’t set the freight rate — the loader does. What you decide is which vehicle you buy and how much you borrow. You bring the rate; the tool tells you which vehicle survives it.” Turnaround time, he warned, is the variable most fleet owners underestimate fatally. “If even one trip takes one extra day, you are dead,” cautioned Mr. Sharma.
The tool also handles documentation — e-way bill tracking, insurance, RC details, and permit deadlines — with Google Maps integration connecting drivers to nearby RTO offices, tyre shops, and insurance support. Costing remains the core of the product, with compliance sitting alongside it. “The calculator is the reason you open it,” he says. “The expiry dates are the reason you open it again next month.”
An Industry That Does Not Know It Is Losing Money
“Thousands of vehicles are running on routes, making loss. Nobody knows until there is no money in the account,” Mr. Sharma said. Fleet owners manage EMIs month to month, borrow informally, and mistake survival for profitability. His argument is simple — a ₹ 50 lakh truck should earn at least 8% annually after all expenses. Most do not even come close, he pointed out.
What Comes Next
Right now, Mr. Sharma is the tool’s only regular user. He is in talks with the founder of Chromo.ai — a Delhi-based transport technology platform — about offering NEXUS AI alongside Chromo.ai to transport operators, though nothing is yet agreed. He is looking for a technical partner to build a proper app backend, essential for use even in areas with poor connectivity. Mr. Sharma has no users beyond himself. No revenue. No funding. What he has is data, domain knowledge that cannot be replicated, and the absolute conviction that the problem he is solving is real, he reiterated.
“Anybody can copy this,” he said, without any apparent concern. “But they don’t have my data. And they don’t know the mathematics behind how you arrive at cost per km. If someone thinks it is easy, it is not.”
Coming from someone who built a 117-truck fleet, watched it shrink to 43, and turned that painful experience into a tool that could save thousands of transport businesses from the same fate — that is not arrogance. That is hard-won clarity.