CurbWaste’s Mike Marmo talks Series B funding, modern tech and more

CurbWaste, a New York-based company specializing in software solutions for waste management, has announced the completion of a $28 million Series B funding round, bringing its total funding to $50 million.

The round was led by Socium Ventures, an Atlanta venture and growth investment firm backed by Cox Enterprises. Participation from Flourish Ventures, TTV Capital, B Capital Group and Squarepoint also contributed to the funds raised. The new funding aims to fuel team growth, go-to-market expansion and product innovation with a focus on artificial intelligence (AI) tools to remedy industry challenges.

“CurbWaste is transforming an essential industry that impacts every community in America,” David Yang, partner at Socium Ventures, says. “The team is empowering waste haulers with modern, intuitive solutions that make their lives easier, which keep all of our cities cleaner and more efficient.”

Founded in 2016 by former hauler Mike Marmo, CurbWaste now supports 150 haulers across the U.S., ranging from small family businesses to large regional operators.  

“We built CurbWaste to level the playing field for haulers, giving them the modern tools they’ve long deserved to run more efficiently and compete under challenging conditions,” Marmo, also the company’s CEO, says. “These are family businesses at the heart of their communities. We know they have been outspoken with their waste hauler software wants and needs, and we must continue to listen. With this funding, we can move even faster to build that shared vision of growing their revenue, eliminating cost centers, and focusing on what they do best: servicing their customers.”

Speaking with Waste Today, Marmo gives insights into the significance of the funding, the future of modern technology in waste management and what these changes signify for independent haulers.

“This industry is a very personal thing for me. I came from four generations of waste haulers. I was a waste hauler myself. I ran waste companies. I understand how overlooked, sometimes, this industry is and how it gets taken for granted,” he says. “I think a lot of people don't really understand the criticality of how important this is: the infrastructure and what they're doing on a daily basis. But the landscape is moving quickly.”

According to Marmo, the waste management industry has had difficulty adopting emerging technologies. However, he anticipates that technology will only continue to move at an increasingly rapid pace, changing “fairly dramatically” — particularly with AI moving the goalpost across the board.

“We’re in a truly industrious period as it relates to tech and tech advancement,” Marmo says. “What used to be a ‘nice to have’ is now becoming a requirement, a need. Regardless of what these haulers are doing, tech has to be a core part of how they're thinking. It's going to either [help them] keep pace with the market or it's going to allow them a better opportunity to be successful and be competitive. I would implore everybody to take it seriously, because it's really something that's going to move the needle.”

The funding, he says, poses an opportunity for CurbWaste to build for what its customers need and address immediate industry pain points.

“The waste industry, holistically, has struggled given that it's very fragmented,” Marmo adds. “There's a lot of data flowing around from all different places, and the workflows are very nuanced. There's a lot of challenging things that come with running a waste company.”

At present, Marmo says the company’s biggest priority is its reporting framework. CurbWaste is working to leverage technology to enable owners, administrators and personnel to partake in proactive versus reactive decision making. Data integration is also another significant priority — including integrating with companies’ GPS, telematics, payroll maintenance and more.

“We want to make it so that they can drill down on what's working and what isn't working,” he says. “We want to give very unique insights that are also going to help with acquisition strategies. If they're trying to go out and buy companies through a mergers and acquisitions strategy or if they're looking to be acquired, I think that very uniquely positions them to do so.”

As the company looks toward the end of the year and ahead into 2026, Marmo says CurbWaste will begin work on route optimization tooling, specifically around AI power, to help dispatchers leverage both historical and forward-looking data.

“We are working on some exciting things as it relates to data and business intelligence,” he notes. “We're going to be investing pretty heavily in some of the data architecture that we're building and making sure that these waste companies have very unique insights into their business [and can] drill down as deep as they want to be able to drill down but also see it from 35,000 feet.”

Long term, Marmo hopes to see CurbWaste become the system of record for the industry.

“We’re trying to achieve something extraordinary. If I had to articulate what I'd want our legacy to be, I just want to be a small part of every one of our customers’ success stories,” he says. “I want CurbWaste to be something that helps them achieve whatever their goals are. It could be to be the next waste management [leader], or it could be to build a legacy company that they can pass down from generation to generation or something as simple as servicing their community in a meaningful way — bringing a solution that makes them a core part of their community. I want us to be a small part of that, and I want to help make that easier for them.”