GroundWidgets (GW) is the latest company to join software and payments firm Fullsteam, following Limo Anywhere (LA) and Addons a few years ago. Collectively, the companies are pooling their resources to not only deliver cutting-edge features but also access to the hospitality verticals under the Fullsteam umbrella.
We caught up with GroundWidgets CEO Apurva Patel as well as Limo Anywhere President Sean Arena and Chief Innovation Officer/Addons Co-founder Andrew Norman on how the merger has impacted their companies, helped the industry, and what operators can expect next.
Sean Arena Chauffeur Driven: What’s the strategy behind Fullsteam acquiring so many software companies within our industry?
Sean Arena: Fullsteam has invested across many different verticals within various industries. With respect to ground, they have made a conscious decision to go deep based on the successes we’ve seen with the recent acquisitions of both LA and Addons and now with GW. There are over 85 various software companies across multiple industries within Fullsteam, many of which are complementary. They look for synergistic opportunities: They have software solutions for property management, parking, automotive maintenance, event management, tour operators ... so there’s a lot of collaborative opportunities to drive value for our customers
Apurva Patel Apurva Patel: Fullsteam’s primary objective is ‘building on great,’ and they see the transportation industry as a unique opportunity where they could have a meaningful impact and help the industry grow. Bringing our companies into the fold was a way for them to help drive automation across the customer base, while being able to offer a solution that’s cradle to grave over the lifecycle of the company.
CD: How else does the industry benefit?
SA: Let’s think about, as Apurva mentioned, the evolution of an operator’s business. You will never outgrow our collective portfolio, so you will be able to maintain continuity of your business from an IO all the way to a national operator. From a support perspective, there are significant resources. We have over 50 customer training, support, and implementation specialists helping our customers every day. Consider our collective pool of assets that we can bring beyond just the core software dispatch: payment solutions, GPS tracking, staffing, managed IT services, digital marketing services, and mobility products. There’s a lot of new value we can drive through our portfolio of businesses within ground, but also the assets at the broader level within Fullsteam.
Andrew Norman AP: The key point here really is that we can consolidate that level of technology and automation and bring it to our clients in a more cost-effective way and help them reduce their operating expenses and drive profitability.
CD: How are you maintaining your brand integrity?
SA: It’s in our core DNA collectively to do right by our customers. We work collaboratively with businesses to help understand what their needs are, where they are within their business’ lifecycle, and what solutions are best fit for where they want to go. It’s very consultative in how we engage our collective customers to ensure that they’re on the right software platform or offer a seamless migration experience. Further, the interoperability between the software is another key area of investment. For instance, we’re now in live work mode with GroundXChange between LA and Santa Cruz (GW’s software) and soon with Livery Coach. I think we have a solid playbook for how we help our customers understand what is right for them based on where they are.
AP: It’s about leveraging development resources by no longer building duplicative technology between our companies and focusing on creating next-generation products together. Collectively, we can bring more functional opportunities to help operators manage their businesses. We don’t see this as a one-spoke software solution. Our goal is to focus on how we can help our customers grow their businesses, whether that’s with GroundXChange for increased efficiency and automation or thinking outside the box with our products and services.
CD: Addons was ahead of the curve with the AI. How is this impacting the platforms under Fullsteam?
Andrew Norman: With Addons, we’ve really focused on making the complex simple whether it’s for a one-car operator all the way up to a national brand. And as we’ve done for CRM interactions, making them more streamlined and less complicated, we’re doing the same thing with AI. We’ve spent a lot of time in the last year making sure that we’re fully AI ready in all aspects of our technology stack, and we’re just going to keep pushing that lead forward to where we can bring meaningfully curated AI capabilities to the ecosystem. What continues to be a focus of my and Apurva’s teams is how we leverage resources from Fullsteam’s greater portfolio and bring that to our customers in a very simple and easy-to-consume fashion.
CD: Are there any new or upcoming features you’d like to share?
AN: Absolutely. We’re in beta with a lot of operators and our AI-assisted booking tools that are hooked into our platforms, like Lead Quote Close, that are really helping operators drive bookings and engagements on web properties. That’s been going very well and will become generally available here in the fall for all our operators. We put a lot of time and testing into that and are seeing positive results.
SA: We’re taking a very thoughtful and methodical approach to AI that’s taken many months of testing and adjustments to ensure we hit the mark. For customer-facing solutions, we want to make sure we get the right feedback. We’re currently testing the conversational commerce aspect of this, but there are additional opportunities that we will be rolling out over the coming year that have AI behind it. Email is an example where we can offer the ability to parse, read, and provide automated responses to help reduce overhead within your call center or support center.
AP: We’re focused on addressing the day-to-day operational requirements of our clients. So, for example, how we provide them with better scheduling applications or better driver management, things that have a meaningful impact on their business and provide a frictionless consumer experience. We are taking a three-phase approach to AI by pulling analytics first and looking at our clients’ data to identify business trends and see how we can help them improve. Beyond Analytics, the other two phases are Operational AI, which will help drive business automation and eventually Agentic AI for customer engagement. The AI is going to have to learn and adapt to how the industry operates and how each business runs.
SA: We’re always looking for how we can better automate, create broader and more predictive insights, and offer an intuitive customer experience behind what we roll out. We’ve made many advancements within LA Pay like pre-authorization with our booking engine and batch payment processing, which was often requested by our customers. Extra gratuity, tap to pay, and ACH are coming soon as well as a new merchant track dashboard, which our customers will really love. We have Auto Farm now, which is an intelligent farm-out agent that learns based on their behaviors from an affiliate management perspective and automates the process to their constituents. We are also rolling out geofencing for our driver app, compliance management, and of course, GroundXchange integration between LA, Santa Cruz, and Livery Coach which we touched upon a bit ago.
AN: Needless to say, we are busy over here. We did cloud migration recently that’s really paid dividends, and we’re going to continue to listen to customers and solve problems for them.
CD: What features are people not taking advantage of that you think that they should be?
AN: We have a lot of features and sometimes it gets overwhelming, so we generally crawl-walk-run when onboarding customers. Every operator should first manage their social media presence, get feedback with surveys, and provide timely and relevant communications to the customer throughout their journey. Then we go on a case-by-case basis. Our customers will either utilize everything, or some may never fully use the platform to its capability. Our onboarding, sales, and customer service support teams constantly coach customers on opportunities that they have that may be improved by using technology to do that.
SA: We have ADP integration that’s very beneficial for automating or streamlining payroll, as well as QuickBooks integration for affiliate management. Every operator obviously has different pain points, so, to Andy’s point, our challenge is always how we’re bringing knowledge and awareness of our capabilities to our users. We are currently rolling out our new next-gen Dispatch interface, leveraging a brand-new user interface, a new front-end technology, and a true, seamless unification of Addons and LA capabilities. Feedback so far has been very positive, and we expect this to be widely adopted.
AP: A platform like Santa Cruz has been designed with a lot of feedback from customers. We try to incorporate what we would call best practices of technology and automation in the industry, but what may be important to operator A may not be important to operator B. We also foresee challenges in helping the industry unify across common standards to drive efficiency. SA: I think that’s a very important point. We as an industry need to align around some standards across these various components that are fundamental if we want to be able to advance real-time, custom bookable affiliate relationships.
CD: Where do operators need to step up their game regarding technology?
AP: Many operators are recognizing the need to embrace new technology more proactively to stay ahead of customer expectations and industry trends. The pace of innovation in our industry means that tools for automation, scheduling, payments, and customer engagement are available today that can significantly improve efficiency and profitability. Our role is to make these technologies accessible and cost-effective so that businesses of every size can benefit.
SA: I’d add that stepping up doesn’t mean replacing the personalized, high-touch service that defines this industry—it means enhancing it. Operators who lean into technology gain the ability to streamline back-office work, reduce errors, and free up time for what matters most. We’re here to make that transition as seamless as possible, giving operators confidence that technology will support, not disrupt, the quality of service they’re known for.
AN: It can be overwhelming for small operators to adopt advanced tools without the right support, which is why we guide them step-by-step. Too often they’re going out and picking the latest flashy AI thing that can’t connect to any data and therefore can’t provide any action. We want to help customers avoid falling into that sort of trap.
CD: What’s on your wish list for the coming year?
AP: It’s really about helping to drive awareness of the benefits of automation and getting our clients to understand that investing in technology is just as critical as investing in vehicles. It should be seen as a core component of their business because this technology keeps their service running 24/7. If they lose technology, they don’t have a platform to run their businesses. I see it no differently than budgeting for leases, insurance, and electricity.
SA: Wholeheartedly agree. Another point would be a universal alignment around the industry standards we previously mentioned. We need to be rowing in the same direction and speaking the same language in terms of rates, schedules, inventory, vehicles, etc. If customers can embrace the technology, and help us adopt some of these standards, we as an industry will be extremely healthy in the years to come.
AN: At a macro level, I’m proud of the team at LA, and I’m looking forward to the future. We’re in a good spot and we want to keep collaborating and rowing in the same direction with our customer base so we win together. It makes my job easier, and everybody at LA is hyper focused on that. [CD1025]
