Foley is a leading-edge software for transportation risk, DOT compliance, and employee screening.
Joel Sitak, Chief Executive Officer, shares details on Foley and what it’s like to work there.
In This Video
We discuss:
- Details on Foley
- How Foley helps their customers
- The history of Foley and what’s next
- Foley’s new office and their culture
- Why now is a good time to join Foley
Video Transcript
Joel, thanks so much for joining us.
Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.
I’m excited to talk to you because we’re going to talk about Foley, which is reimagining how safety sensitive industries hire, stay compliant, and manage risk. So, there’s a lot to unpack there. Talk more about Foley and what you guys do.
Yes, it’s it’s definitely a a niche industry. Um, but Folio is a vertical SAS company and and we focus on employers who are hiring uh regulated workforces and need to manage those uh regulated workforces. And so we provide a SAS platform in that industry that helps our customers uh hire and recruit uh regulated drivers, regulated employees, uh onboard those employees and then monitor those employees for risk. And so we think it has uh obviously a very uh niche industry but has an important impact to our customers and how they manage DOT regulations and the impact it has on their insurance premiums can be uh pretty significant.
All right. So let’s talk a little bit more in detail about how the platform works. Share some customer examples and use cases.
Yeah. So what we identified in in the marketplace was uh that our customers faced uh two critical problems and I think it’s really important to focus on those problems when you’re developing software and solutions. The first problem is that they have to hire great drivers quickly. Uh anytime a a vehicle is empty, the business is losing revenue. And when uh when we looked at the marketplace, they’re just not very adept at uh hiring. Uh and so we felt like we could modernize some of those processes for our customers. Maybe more importantly, we identified an opportunity where our customers were not managing risk all that well. And uh that risk in is in the form of Department of Transportation fines and out of service violations which can be significantly detrimental to their companies. And importantly, insurance uh companies are looking at those violations and assessing and premiums based on them. And so there is a a real motivation to manage DOT compliance and uh it’s it’s not a it’s not a solution that’s a nice to have, it’s a must to have because of the financial consequences if they don’t do it well. And we so we looked at that spectrum of of employees from uh recruiting through to onboarding through to managing that risk around the employee. and we’ve built our platform around that. And now with the advent of artificial intelligence coupled with the data that we gather throughout that uh employees uh life at the at the company, we think it’s a pretty rich opportunity to help modernize what is otherwise a sector that’s not typically adept at adopting technology.
And I when I think about it, it’s like, you know, some of these trucking companies, the the size of their fleet and the scale is massive. So, you know, the employee base is something that needs to be uh managed continuously. And I didn’t even think like the insurance premiums for those drivers is got to be astronomical. And if they can keep that premium to a certain level, that’s a huge savings.
It is. It’s it’s the largest financial driver. And uh we what we often incur today and we work with uh very small customers up through enterprise customers. you know, our customers are in construction and utilities, a lot of private fleets that uh, you know, have to look at this carefully because it does really affect uh their business. And we’re really helping them manage risk, which starts with who they hire and and giving them better information around uh when they go to make a hire and ensure that that employee is onboarded correctly according to the Department of Transportation regulations that are both federal and state. So it’s a very complicated uh process. And then maybe where the most value uh exists for our customers is monitoring that driver um in their DOT regulations and safety on an ongoing basis so they can take action quickly. And the way we do that is through artificial intelligence and through uh data. We think that’s uh very core to our strategy that helps our customer manage this risk and ultimately delivers better outcomes in the insurance premiums.
All right. In terms of Foley as a company, talk a little bit about the history and obviously looking ahead, what’s what’s happening at Foley.
Yeah, we we started as a service business and moved into a tech- enabled services business throughout our evolution. The company’s over 30 years old and uh you know we think that history is important to our future because we’ve learned a lot about the regulations and how they apply to our customers over the years. And what’s changed in our business is we’ve realized to solve these two critical problems for our customers. We have to do that with data and software and now with artificial intelligence. We’ve invested significantly in building a an AI um native platform uh to help our customers and that data that we collect across the industry is helpful in our customers and delivering the solution. So data and predictive analytics is core to our go forward strategy as is using uh different flavors of AI in the platform. In some cases, it’s a simple LLM that’s advising our customers. In other cases, it’s using agents to help them complete work, to recruit better, to um manage their compliance and uh better. Uh in other cases, we’re we’ll be using machine learning to help with predictive analytics to help our customers assess where does risk uh exist within their driving population. And so we’re pretty excited about the advent of artificial intelligence and how data intersects with it to deliver better outcomes for our customers.
Well, it’s an exciting time for Foley. You’re launching a new office in Boston. So, what are the details behind that as well as growth plans and what’s it like to work there as far as the culture at Foley?
Yes, we are excited to uh put our roots in Seapport. So, uh, we’re just in the process of opening our a new office when the pandemic hit several years ago. Like most companies, we went to a remote, uh, work structure. Uh, we felt it was time to get back into the office. Uh, and so we’ve, uh, centered into Seapport in Boston. We think it’s just a great market for attracting talent and engineering and sales. Uh, so we’ve, uh, we have approximately 300 employees. Uh, you know, we’re going to grow quickly. Uh we anticipate we’ll have about 60 team members in our in our Boston office to really have a center of gravity uh uh centered around our sales and uh organization in in the Seapport district. So we’re pretty excited about launching into Seapport and becoming a resident there and and uh establishing oursel in that community as it’s an upand cominging place in Boston as as a lot of us know that culturally um I think we have a culture that has a high accountability and and team first uh culture. Uh we have three core values that I think we adopt very well. They’re just not words written on the side of a of a plaque inside the office, but it’s teammateship. We really believe that great things can happen when we work together. And so that’s our first core value that we uh that we look at uh to establish if it’s a good fit for our for our working at Foley and our team. Really important. Great things can happen when people work well together. And so that’s something that we look for to help build our culture. Uh the second is innovation. Uh we’re leaning heavily into artificial intelligence. We are believers of it. Uh we just hired a chief AI officer to join us that uh has over 15 years of experience to uh in AI which is very uncommon but uh roots back to IBM Watson in helping them develop uh AI solutions that we think we can take advantage of as we build out uh not just AI in our product but also and we’re uh forwardleaning in at innovation uh around artificial intelligence as we think it can help uh not only our customers but us at Foley be a lot more productive and grit is our third core value which uh we also uh value highly um you know it’s an business moves quickly we have to be adaptable sometimes uh things work and sometimes they don’t work and we have to be able to adapt accordingly and uh be gritty in how we approach uh our our work on a day-to-day basis. So teammateship, innovation, and grit are how I would best uh describe our core values. And you know, when we look for people to join and and what we think we can offer at Foley is a lot of ownership and autonomy, uh we’re big believers in experimentation and doing things to uh try and and see uh if they work and if they fail, we want to fail fast and learn from those experiences and and just create a really dynamic work environment that we have here.
Now top tier talent regardless of market conditions they always have options for their career. So why is now the ideal time to join Foley?
I think software companies in general um at this current moment uh in early 26 are coming under a lot of pressure. Um if if you’re a pure software play uh artificial intelligence can uh make you obsolete. And I think we have some uh real differentiating factors at Foley that make it a great place to work. The first is uh data. Uh we collect a significant amount of data that we marry inside of our platform to help our customers make uh better decisions. And that data is proprietary. It’s data that we’ve collected over the past 30 years uh that we can take advantage of in delivering better solutions to our customers. and we just don’t feel that can be replicated through vibe coding uh where pure software plays we believe are under threat from that. I think the second is the understanding of regulations. Um we have 30 years of experience interpreting these regulations. They change frequently at the state and federal level. They have to be stayed on top of. And so when you marry artificial intelligence and data and our regulatory knowhow, it really gives us a moat around the business that we’re building that is uh I think differentiated from pure software companies. And the last uh component I would uh mention is that services are still embedded into our platform. uh the customer can make in-app purchases of uh of our uh legacy uh services at Foley and those are also diff difficult to replicate and so when you bring these factors together we think we have a really sustainable business to go forward in this uncertain time of SAS of SAS businesses that you know if it’s a pure SAS business tied to seat licenses those are under pressure for uh for revenue as AI has cannibalized some of that so when we bring all these factors together Um, not to mention, you know, we’re selling into a largely untapped $4.5 billion dollar market. We think the product market fit is good. It’s a large market. And we think these are really compelling reasons why you’d want to invest your career at Foley.
Well, if you are interested in exploring opportunities at Foley, you need to go to their company page on VentureFizz, which has all their job listings. Go to venturefizz.com/foley and you’ll see their job listings there. Joel, thanks so much for taking the time to walk us through all the great details about Foley.
Thanks so much, Keith. I appreciate the opportunity.
