In 2024, Marina Brown decided to take a leap of faith and start her own company, Moneiva. A longtime logistics and transportation executive, Brown wanted to fix industry invoicing and cash flow problems with artificial intelligence. 

One of the first calls she made to see if Moneiva was on the right track was to Daragh Mahon, executive vice president and chief information officer at transportation giant Werner Enterprises, where Brown had previously worked. The invoicing solution wasn’t the right fit, Mahon said.

So Brown pivoted to automating supply chain communications to help operations run smoothly. For both Moneiva and Werner, it was a winning approach. “Literally within a month and a half, we went from, ‘Let’s do business together’ to actually doing business together,” Brown said. 

“Being able to then go to the next client and say, ‘Hey, Werner has adopted our technology. These are the workflows that we have built with them. These are the results that we’re getting.’ It means everything,” she said. “What Werner did for us is get us just about every other customer afterwards.”

Over the past few years, Werner has made a name for itself in the Nebraska startup ecosystem. The company is a hands-on corporate innovator, actively seeking out, investing in and working with startups, including through partners like the Nebraska Startup Academy. Werner has worked with over 15 startups so far.

Mahon is, in many ways, the face of Werner’s startup efforts. He spends much of his time advocating for local business leaders to get more involved, including through the trade group Tech Nebraska — not just because it helps corporations but because it benefits the state.

“I want people to understand that there’s such a thriving (startup) community here in Nebraska, and our job as CIOs, as CTOs, as CEOs should be to help support that community,” Mahon said. “That’s what keeps talent in Nebraska.”

In Brown’s experience, Werner is unique in the corporate world. She has worked with companies that begrudgingly partner with startups, but don’t expend any effort. 

“That’s not how Werner is — Werner really wants you to be successful,” Brown said. “They understand the value of what your technology is going to bring to them.”

No corporate innovation without startups

Before joining Werner in 2020, Mahon spent much of his career in Atlanta. There, he watched the startup scene grow up, including through local incubators supported by the likes of Coca-Cola and Salesforce. 

“I saw the impact that very little dollars from corporations that size could have for those entrepreneurs,” Mahon said. “So it stuck with me.”

Over time, he also saw companies once considered innovative — such as Microsoft, Oracle and SAP — stagnate. Rather than being on the cutting edge of technology, they became fast (and sometimes slow) followers of trends set by others, Mahon said.

Mahon said he is convinced, “and there’s no one who can convince me otherwise … (that) the only place real innovation in tech is happening is at a startup level.”

So when Mahon was brought to Werner to help modernize the company’s infrastructure, he saw an opportunity to work with local founders. Nowadays, every company is a tech company. To stay ahead of competition and solve problems, working with startups is a must.

“There was a large recognition by the executive team here that we’ve got to change our tech if we’re going to be successful,” Mahon said. His startup approach has received support “from the very highest levels of the organization, from (the) chairman and CEO, my boss in front of the entire board and then my peers in the C-suite.”

At first, Mahon personally connected with startups through Werner board members and local startup figures like Charlie Cuddy, the managing partner at Move Venture Capital and the executive director of the Nebraska Startup Academy.

“Word got around very rapidly that, ‘Hey, Werner is open for business,’ so then everyone’s knocking on your door,” Mahon said. “Which is great, but then it meant, OK, I can’t spend all day, every day, listening to pitches from startups or looking at demos.”

To manage the influx, Werner invested in Autotech Ventures, a VC fund in California that specializes in transportation technology. Mahon will still take introductions, but for startups cold-calling Werner, he’ll direct them to Autotech for vetting before following up.

For Werner to consider working with a startup, “it’s got to fill a hole for us, or it’s got to do a job for us,” Mahon said. But that doesn’t mean founders need to have a complete product ready to go.

“In some cases, the demo was a PowerPoint because no code had been written,” he said. “Sometimes, it’s a leap of faith. It really is nothing more than, ‘Hey, I believe these people, they seem like they know what they’re talking about.’”

Hands-on collaboration 

Around 2021, Terry Reinert started to see more companies worried that criminals or state-sponsored groups could hack into their transportation networks and grind business to a halt. He had just the tech to help: A box that, plugging into vehicles, could detect and block cyberattacks.

Reinert co-founded Fleet Defender shortly after to protect government and commercial vehicles with the tool. Soon, he was introduced to Mahon, who came to see a demo. 

Reinert showed all the ways he could hack into an Audi A6, the same car Mahon drove. “We could control every aspect of the vehicle,” Reinert said. “We could listen to what the occupants were saying. We could control the steering, the brakes, the accelerator.”

Then Fleet Defender showed how it could prevent those hacks. Mahon instantly knew he wanted to do business — he had been looking for a solution like Reinert’s to secure Werner’s trucks. Within a few weeks, Werner invested in Fleet Defender, Reinert said.

That kind of speed is essential to cash-strapped startups, and rare to see from slow-moving corporations. “You raise a million bucks, you burn a million bucks, you have no revenue, you’re dead,” Reinert said. “So you have to have these companies like Werner” who are willing to be early investors and customers.

But Mahon did ask for a pivot. Physically recalling every truck from across the country to install Fleet Defender’s cybersecurity tool would be an expensive logistical nightmare. Instead, it needed to be software-only.

To support that change, Werner gave Fleet Defender space in its office and help from its staff. “That was probably the single longest ramp we had, where we spent maybe 18 months working with him before we had a viable product,” Mahon said. “Now it’s on the entire fleet.”

Werner helped catapult Fleet Defender’s business. “We went from a small pilot of 100 trucks with Werner to being on over 14,000 commercial vehicles (for different companies) across North America,” Reinert said.

Mahon deeply enjoys collaborating with startups and seeing them develop from idea to deployed product. He does wish more founders focused on infrastructure and security so they could more easily and securely manage the data throughput companies require.

Founders also need to remember that companies like Werner just can’t move as fast as startups can. At the same time, Mahon wishes more corporate leaders understood the impact they could have by working with startups, both on the local economy and themselves.

“You might only find one every three years, but there’s an idea that’s going to change how you do business,” Mahon said. “You just got to go find it, and the only way you’re going to find it is to go talk to startups.”