Juan Pablo Cuartas has built VePAI around a simple but powerful idea: Colombian truckers’ economy cannot keep working with blind spots. In a country where about 310,000 truck drivers move the goods people eat, wear, and use every day, he wants to turn the daily noise of WhatsApp messages into useful data for companies, insurers, and banks.
The problem behind the platform
The problem starts with invisibility; many drivers work without formal tools that show how much they earn per trip, when their trucks may break down, or how well they perform in front of a lender or insurer. That lack of visibility makes the sector harder to finance, harder to plan, and more expensive to manage, which affects the broader Colombian logistics chain.
Cuartas says VePAI steps into that gap by living inside WhatsApp, the channel many drivers already use. The platform captures voice notes, photos from vehicle checks and road events, then turns them into structured information that commercial partners can use to make decisions; in practice, that means less guesswork and more evidence when a company assigns loads, prices risk, or tracks performance.
Why Juan Pablo Cuartas chose this path
Cuartas did not arrive at this idea by accident; he studied industrial engineering in Barcelona and later completed an MBA in Bogotá, but he says his most useful training came from 16 years of selling complex technology in business-to-business markets. That experience shaped how he sees the problem: not as a simple app to download, but as an operating system for a sector that already exists in the real world.
He and his team also worked from the street, not from theory alone; they tested the idea with truck drivers and with customers already linked to a GPS business, then adjusted the product until they found buyers willing to pay for the value VePAI produces. That process is important because many startups fail when they build for a market that sounds large but does not yet pay for the service.
What the business changes
VePAI tries to change the relationship between drivers and the institutions around them. A generator of cargo can see what happened to a truck hours after dispatch, an insurer can price risk with more precision, and a bank can evaluate whether an owner-operator runs a responsible business. Those changes may sound technical, but they affect real money, especially for drivers who depend on credibility to get better contracts.
The model also has a wider economic logic. Cuartas argues that if the platform makes drivers more visible, it can help reduce empty trips, improve load planning, and lower uncertainty across the chain. That could improve profitability for some transporters, while giving Colombian companies better control over one of the country’s most essential sectors.
The scale question of Colombian truckers
The big challenge now is scale. Cuartas believes VePAI can grow because it works in WhatsApp, a tool that drivers already know and use, which lowers the barrier to adoption. Still, scale will depend on whether shippers, insurers, and banks trust the data enough to change how they operate.
That is where the story becomes bigger than a startup. If VePAI succeeds, Colombia could convert a huge informal logistics network into a more legible economic system. If it fails, the country will keep living with a freight sector that moves a large share of daily life while remaining partially invisible to finance, policy, and planning.