Yersultan Jussakinov founded Call2Action.ai five years ago. A lot has changed since then: what started out as a customer support assistant has grown into a platform that helps US trucking companies find drivers.
For “100 Startup Stories from Central Eurasia”, a joint project by Digital Business and Astana Hub, we spoke to Yersultan about why US trucking companies can spend months trying to find drivers, how AI takes care of the first-round interviews, and how his startup helps fill open roles in just 72 hours.
“I was tired of constantly having to step back into day-to-day operations to handle hiring”
— How did your career begin?
— I’m from Almaty. After school, I went to the college affiliated with the Kazakh-American University, then enrolled at the Almaty University of Power Engineering and Telecommunications to study radio engineering and communications. I also studied in England. When I came back to Kazakhstan, I started trying my hand at business.
I tried a few different businesses, made plenty of mistakes, and lost quite a bit of money along the way. But for the past eight years, I’ve been focused on IT and e-commerce. I sold products through online marketplaces and ran web development companies, as well as marketing and SEO agencies. One of those projects was an online shop selling sports nutrition, vitamins, and home and car products across Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, and several European countries.
That business had large sales and customer support teams, around 50 people altogether. Staff turnover was always high, with someone leaving roughly every six months. That’s pretty normal in this kind of industry. A lot of the employees were students trying to juggle work with their studies, and they knew from the start that they probably wouldn’t stay with us for long. At some point, I just got tired of having to step away from strategy and planning and dive back into the day-to-day work of hiring.
By 2021, we had several developers on the team, and we put together a rough solution for handling day-to-day operations and hiring. It was an AI bot that could partly take over the work of sales and customer support staff. Once a customer placed an order, the system would contact them and confirm the details, including the city, delivery time, quantity, and price. It also called potential candidates and asked about their work experience, location, and other details. Over the next six months, we realised that instead of 50 people, we only needed 30. We had almost accidentally built a piece of software that could be turned into a standalone product. That’s how Call2Action.ai came about.
— The product looks very different today and now helps US trucking companies find drivers. How did that shift happen?
— We initially sold Call2Action.ai in Kazakhstan. Its clients included Kazakhtelecom, Kazpost, OLX, flower shops, dental clinics, and delivery companies. The service would automatically call customers and confirm the details of their orders.
But we knew the market in Kazakhstan was small, and the sales cycle was incredibly long. Signing a contract with a large client could take almost a year. We felt Call2Action.ai had the potential to expand into other markets, so we tried the MENA region. We joined the first cohort of Antler’s accelerator programme, and I spent three months living in Riyadh. But there was a lot of bureaucracy, and the startup ecosystem worked very differently from what we were used to. In the end, we weren’t able to gain a foothold there.
After returning to Kazakhstan, we joined the AlchemistX & Silicon Valley Residenceprogramme run by Astana Hub and Silkroad Innovation Hub in 2024. The programme is designed to help startups break into the US market, and for us, it was a real turning point. I’d already been to the US four times as a tourist, so I had a sense of just how big and profitable the market was. People there have money to spend and are willing to pay, but it’s also a tough market to get into.
We started looking at where our product could be useful. I knew a few people in the trucking industry, and after talking things through with them, we spotted a new niche for Call2Action.ai: helping trucking companies find drivers.
“Truck drivers are hard to find and easy to lose”
— From the outside, it’s hard to see what the problem is. Why is finding a truck driver so difficult?
— Let’s start with the bigger picture. The US trucking market is worth just under a trillion dollars and employs nine million people, including 3.5 million drivers, across 580,000 companies. Trucks carry 75% of all freight, while trains and planes combined account for the remaining 25%.
Annual turnover among truck drivers is around 80–100%, which means most of them change jobs roughly once a year. You won’t find them on LinkedIn or anything like HeadHunter, and you’re lucky if two out of ten even have a CV. When we pitch, we joke that truck drivers are “hard to find and easy to lose”.
Most hiring happens through personal connections and referrals. A common story goes like this: someone moves to the US, spends 10 or 15 years working as a driver, saves up, leases a few trucks, and starts their own company. Chances are, they’ll then look for drivers from their home country or region. So, for example, someone from Kazakhstan might simply call relatives and friends back home and ask who would be interested in working as a truck driver in the US. It works well for both sides: the pay is very good, the employer and driver share a similar background and mindset, and everyone is happy with the arrangement.
But things have changed recently. The US authorities introduced a law that means anyone without US citizenship or a green card can no longer work as a driver. Their CDL, the commercial driving licence truck drivers need, simply won’t be renewed.
According to estimates from Valverde, around 250,000 people are set to lose their jobs in the near future, which means the same number of vacancies will open up. And trucks, much like planes, can’t afford to sit idle. They only make money when they’re out on the road. A tractor-trailer costs around $200,000, so companies usually lease them rather than buy them outright. Without a driver, the owner loses roughly $5,000 a month in lease payments and insurance. That’s why trucking companies need to fill vacancies fast and get those vehicles earning money again.
“We can find a driver in 72 hours”
— But drivers still aren’t on LinkedIn. So how exactly do you find candidates and connect them with employers?
— Call2Action.ai is a platform that finds drivers on social media based on the criteria set by the client, in this case, the trucking company. It uses highly targeted advertising to reach the right people. Once a driver sees the ad and completes a questionnaire, an AI recruiter gets in touch to confirm the details and carry out an initial interview.
The hiring process has three parts, and we cover all three, but we never cut the recruiter out of the loop. The first is finding drivers. The second is interviewing and tracking candidates: how many people have been interviewed and where each person is in the hiring funnel. The third is checking each individual candidate: how many violations they have, whether there are any complaints against them, whether they have caused any accidents, and what their immigration and documentation status is. For these checks, we integrate with licensed third-party providers. These companies collect and process the data in line with legal requirements and return the results through their own services.
We’re an official partner of Meta and Indeed.com. That gives us deeper integration with the Meta ecosystem and other advertising platforms, access to official APIs, and a higher level of security, stability, and performance when running ad campaigns. We also have agreements with other similar services. Call2Action.ai acts as a central hub for drivers. Using algorithms, targeted advertising, and AI, we find candidates who match the client’s requirements and focus each campaign on a specific audience. This helps us bring down CPL, or cost per lead. For $100, a client can now receive anywhere from 30 to 100 applications, compared with around 10 before. The AI also validates each driver so the ads are shown to the audience that is the best fit for the trucking company.
Over the past six months, we’ve built up a database of 20,000 drivers. That’s not huge yet, but once we reach 100,000, we’ll be able to say that Call2Action.ai is the HeadHunter of the US trucking industry.
We also help recruiters within trucking companies themselves. A lot of people in the industry still rely on Excel and don’t use CRM systems, even though the benefits are pretty clear: they can track drivers’ statuses, documents, violations, and completed jobs online. It’s also more secure. It’s much harder for another company to get hold of your drivers and poach them than it is when all that information sits in a spreadsheet that someone can simply copy onto a USB stick.
We handle the entire driver hiring process, from finding candidates right through to the point when they’ve signed all the paperwork and are ready to get behind the wheel. The process can take as little as 72 hours, which is our fastest confirmed case. On average, though, the hiring timeline depends on the company’s requirements, the region, and the availability of suitable candidates. It usually takes anywhere from a few days to two or three weeks. We also bring down the cost of hiring. At the moment, companies in the industry spend around $1,000 per hire. A Call2Action.ai subscription starts at $500, which is already enough to hire two to four drivers. The advertising budget is paid separately.
And I want to stress this again: we’re not replacing the recruiter, just as ChatGPT hasn’t replaced everyone else. Our tool simply makes finding and hiring drivers faster, easier, and less expensive.
— A trucking company or recruitment agency could set up the targeting themselves and add an AI assistant. So what value does your product offer them?
— Voice AI is only one part of the product. You also need to build the entire infrastructure around it, including integrations with advertising platforms, CRM and ATS systems, telephony, and candidate screening services. Then you need to automate the hiring funnel, train the AI to understand the specifics of recruiting CDL drivers, and keep improving the algorithms based on tens of thousands of interviews and real hiring outcomes.
The real value doesn’t come from any one piece of technology. It comes from how everything works together, from bringing in the right candidates and responding quickly to automating communication and using the data we’ve built up over time. Building something like that is much harder than simply adding a voice AI tool or running targeted ads.
“We’ve already conducted more than 10,000 AI interviews”
— You mainly find drivers through Instagram and Facebook. Does that mean a candidate has to say somewhere that they’re a driver, hold a CDL, and have trucking experience? Otherwise, how would they even see the ad?
— The driver sees an ad with a short questionnaire asking whether they’re a driver, how much experience they have, whether they hold a green card or US citizenship, and whether they’re willing to drive long distances. The candidate then enters our system, and within five to ten minutes, an AI recruiter gets in touch with a few follow-up questions. It’s essentially a short initial interview covering where they live, what they drive, what type of trailer they use, since different loads require different experience, and how good their English is. Call2Action.ai then ranks the candidates against the company’s requirements and recommends the drivers who are the best fit.
—AI can make mistakes. How do you account for the risk of the system overlooking a strong candidate?
— Yes, but the AI is constantly learning. We train the LLM and use recordings from real interviews to keep improving the system. It has already conducted more than 10,000 interviews, so Call2Action.ai has become very good at understanding how drivers speak and following the context of the conversation.
“We weren’t selling software. We were selling less truck downtime and lower hiring costs”
— How did you find your first clients in the US?
— They didn’t come through traditional advertising. In the early days, I spoke to trucking company owners one by one, met people across the industry, went to industry events, asked for referrals, and personally ran dozens of demos.
The biggest challenge was earning their trust. A US trucking company isn’t going to buy a product just because it uses AI. Owners want to know whether it solves a real problem, how many drivers you can bring in, how quickly they’ll enter the hiring funnel, and how much money the company will save.
So we kept the message simple. We could help them find drivers faster, handle the first interview automatically, make sure no promising candidates got lost, and keep the whole hiring process in one place. We weren’t really selling software. We were selling fewer idle trucks and a cheaper way to hire drivers.
Those first sales were especially important because they taught us how customers talk about their problems. After every conversation, we changed something, whether it was the product, the offer, or even the questions the AI asked. The US market quickly shows you what customers genuinely need and what only ever made sense in the founder’s head.
— What challenges did you run into?
— One of the first challenges was that we were an unknown startup from Kazakhstan. In the US, no one cares how successful you were in your home market. You start from scratch, with no reputation, no connections, and no recognisable brand. The second challenge was getting deep into the industry. US trucking has its own language, processes, regulations, and dozens of different types of drivers and freight. Until you understand the difference between an owner-operator and a company driver, the various trailer types, and why a driver might be right for one company but not another, clients won’t take you seriously.
The third challenge was that mistakes were expensive. Salaries, development, marketing, and sales all cost a lot in the US. If your product doesn’t match what the market actually needs, you burn through money very quickly. We had to keep talking to customers, make changes fast, and drop features that weren’t creating any real value. But it was absolutely worth it. In a smaller market, you can build a profitable local business, but building a company with global reach is much harder. In the US, customers are willing to pay for a solution when it delivers a clear, measurable result.
I don’t think it would have been easier to build a large product in another country first and then bring it to the US. In most cases, entering the US market means almost starting from scratch anyway. The customers are different, the competition is tougher, and both the sales model and expectations are completely different.
It’s better to get into the market where you want to build a big company as early as possible. It’s harder, more expensive, and much tougher mentally, but this is where we finally got the level of feedback, speed, and ambition we’d been missing before.
“I put $120,000 of my own money into the company and had to sell my car”
— How much does your product cost, and what does the price depend on?
— Our standard packages range from $500 to $2,000 a month. Larger clients get custom terms, which we agree during negotiations. Some companies pay as much as $5,000 a month.
The difference between the packages comes down to how many people the company hires, how large the client is, and what problems they need us to solve. Some clients have nothing set up in their account, while others only need a few adjustments to their targeting.
— Are you profitable?
— Since last month, yes. Our MRR is now around $50,000. We have more than 100 clients, many of them with fleets of roughly 50 trucks, and the Call2Action.ai team has around 12 people.
— Is the company being funded from savings from your previous businesses, or have you raised investment?
— In 2024 and 2025, I put around $120,000 of my own money into the company. I even had to sell my car.
At the end of 2025, we closed a $500,000 pre-seed round at a $6 million valuation. MOST Ventures led the round, with additional investment from angel investors in Uzbekistan and the US.
We’re preparing for another funding round in September and plan to raise $4–5 million. We already have a few preliminary investment commitments.
— You mentioned investors from the US. What were the negotiations like, and what do they look for?
— They already took part in our previous round, and we’re also planning to bring in US investors for the next one.
Those conversations are very numbers-driven. Investors are usually less interested in the idea itself and more interested in proof that the business already works, including revenue growth, customer retention, acquisition costs, market size, the team, and the founder’s ability to execute quickly.
Investors also look closely at how well the founder understands the market. It’s not enough to say that the trucking market is huge. You need to explain who makes the buying decision, how long the sales cycle takes, why customers stay, why they might leave, and how the company plans to grow tenfold.
Another important difference is that US investors often look beyond the product as it stands today and assess the scale of the founder’s vision. For them, trucking should not be the end goal, but the first market through which a much larger platform can be built. That’s why we explain that we’re starting with truck drivers, but in the future, we want to automate hiring for other blue-collar roles as well.
The expectations are pretty demanding. Investors want transparent numbers, quick answers, a well-prepared data room where all the relevant information is stored, and a clear understanding of the risks. They may ask dozens of questions about churn, margins, competitors, and the company’s legal structure. It’s a useful process because after those conversations, you start to understand your own business much better.
“We’re considering expanding into Canada and Mexico”
— There are plenty of other roles in the industry besides drivers, including mechanics, loaders, and warehouse workers. Are you planning to expand into recruiting for those roles as well?
— Trucking is only our entry point. I think we’ve identified the industry’s biggest pain point, and we want to become the HeadHunter for blue-collar workers.
We already have clients in the moving industry, which helps people relocate from one home or office to another. Other potential niches include construction and warehouse operations at companies such as Amazon and Walmart. These businesses always need reliable workers, and finding them is not easy.
— Are you considering expanding into other markets as well?
— We’re considering expanding into Canada and Mexico. The markets are similar to the US, with large territories and a lot of freight transported by road. That will most likely happen towards the end of 2027.
— How do you see the company developing? Do you want it to remain independent, or would you consider selling it to a giant such as Amazon or Walmart?
— A successful founder is measured by the number of exits they achieve, and we have a plan for that. It won’t happen any time soon though. Four or five years would be a good outcome. I expect that either a major HR tech company such as Workday, Deel, Rippling, or Indeed, or a company from the logistics and trucking industry such as USPS, Uber Freight, or DHL, could become interested in us. They could acquire our solution and integrate it into their ecosystem.
— If you were launching Call2Action.ai from scratch, what would you do differently?
— I’d have gone after global markets like the US sooner. I don’t really buy the idea that you can build a successful startup in Kazakhstan and then smoothly take it worldwide. The reality is, every new country means starting from scratch anyway.