The problem we set out to solve
Dan Saunders founded Zeti in 2020 after spotting a gap while working in institutional investment management. Transport had emerged as the UK's largest source of pollution, and while investor appetite for sustainable assets was growing steadily across solar, wind and battery storage, vehicle finance had not caught up. Dan's insight was straightforward: make vehicle financing more flexible and data-driven, and businesses would use it to move to cleaner fleets.
That insight became Zeti's founding thesis: align the cost of a vehicle with how much it is actually used, connecting live asset data across the vehicle's lifecycle to remove the upfront cost barrier that was keeping fleet operators locked into diesel.
Why Dan started Zeti
Dan's background in clean energy and finance shaped his understanding of the problem. Rigid funding models and high upfront costs were the real barrier to zero-emission vehicle adoption, not a lack of demand. He had tested a version of the model before, financing more than £10 million in clean energy projects through a pay-as-you-use structure in 2010. For Dan, this proved that usage-based financing could deliver both emissions reductions and investor returns.
Zeti combined that experience with real-time telematics data, building a platform designed to serve fleet operators and investors at once. Fleet operators gain flexible, affordable access to cleaner vehicles, while investors receive the transparency and live operational insight needed to fund them with greater confidence.
Where Zeti is today
Today, Zeti operates as a connected asset finance platform, with partnerships spanning the transport and mobility sectors. Its recent transaction with Dollaride and Chestnut Run Capital Partners is helping expand access to cleaner, more reliable transportation in underserved communities, providing real-world proof of the impact smarter financing can deliver.
Zeti also continues to work closely with long-standing partners including Otto Car and Paragon Bank, while collaborating with organisations such as CALSTART to support the wider transition to cleaner transportation.
Much of Zeti's work to date has centred on vehicles, but the platform itself is asset-agnostic. Provided an asset generates usable data, Zeti can connect that information across its entire lifecycle, from origination and financing through operation to end-of-life.
From early US presence to a signed deal: Dollaride and Chestnut Run Capital Partners
In May 2026, Zeti announced a partnership with Dollaride and Chestnut Run Capital Partners to finance and manage electric vehicle fleets supporting non-emergency transportation services in New York City. It is the same usage-linked, data-driven model behind Zeti's founding, now being used to direct capital towards communities where public transportation options are limited.
Chestnut Run provided the financing facility behind Dollaride's fleet expansion, while ZetiOS connected real-time asset data directly with the financing and operation of the fleet. The platform monitors vehicle performance and utilisation, provides Chestnut Run with ongoing visibility across the life of the loan, automates billing and collections based on actual usage, and tracks emissions and environmental impact geospatially. Zeti also originated and structured the transaction, bringing the operator and lender together through its platform.
"Access to flexible financing is critical to scaling clean transport solutions," said Dollaride CEO Su Sanni, adding that the partnership gives Dollaride both the capital and the tools needed to manage, track and optimise its fleet in real time.
Chestnut Run's Yeng Felipe Butler pointed to the same connection between data and capital as the differentiator, explaining that "this alignment between data and financing is a key differentiator" as the firm scales its investments in clean transportation.
The financing closed on 5 May and represents the first of several transactions expected under a broader collaboration between Zeti and Chestnut Run. It is an early demonstration of the repeatable, institutional-scale financing model Zeti set out to build.
The shift to institutional capital, transparency and connected asset finance
The Dollaride transaction demonstrates how Zeti's original proposition has evolved. Real-time data is no longer used only to calculate flexible payments for an operator. It can now connect every party involved in financing and operating an asset, giving institutional lenders continuous visibility into performance while automating the administrative processes that sit around the underlying capital.
By bringing asset data, financing, payments and reporting together, ZetiOS helps replace periodic and fragmented information with a live view of how each asset is performing. This can reduce manual administration by up to 60% and improve financial returns by up to 20%. Lenders can identify changes in utilisation or payment performance earlier, operators spend less time managing billing and reconciliation, and environmental outcomes can be measured alongside financial performance.
This is the basis of connected asset finance: capital informed by what an asset is doing throughout its lifecycle, rather than relying solely on information captured when the agreement begins. For Zeti, it represents a natural progression from using data to make individual vehicles more affordable to building the infrastructure through which larger pools of institutional capital can be deployed and managed for commercial fleet finance and transport decarbonisation more broadly.
Find out more about our work with Dollaride and Chestnut Run Capital Partners
Lessons from the journey
What Dan loves most about entrepreneurship has not changed: seeing Zeti's model solve a real-world problem while delivering genuine sustainability impact.
His advice to founders remains the same too. You are not expected to have all the answers. Your job is to attract the people who do and bring them with you.
He points to his late uncle, Terry Johnson, as his startup hero: a self-made entrepreneur from humble beginnings who became one of Cornwall's largest private employers. His persistence and optimism through repeated setbacks left a lasting impression on Dan as a child.
For anyone in the early and hardest years of building a business, Dan recommends Zero to One by Peter Thiel and the Masters of Scale podcast with Reid Hoffman. He is also candid about the cost of founder obsession, the loneliness that can accompany it, and the importance of finding at least one person who has lived through a similar journey and with whom you can talk honestly.
What's next
Zeti's next phase is focused on bringing more operators, funding partners and connected assets onto the platform, while continuing to grow its presence in the US and deepen established partnerships in the UK. As the business scales, the priority remains the same: giving capital providers the visibility they need to invest with confidence and giving operators access to financing that reflects how their assets actually perform.
Over time, that same model can be applied beyond Zeti's existing vehicle portfolio to other data-generating asset classes, creating a more connected and efficient approach to financing assets throughout their lifecycle.