Our Investment in Cavela

The way we sell products has changed dramatically over the past decade. You can launch a brand in a weekend, spin up a storefront in an hour, and reach millions of customers without ever touching a warehouse. But while selling has gone digital, sourcing hasn’t. Manufacturing is still stuck in a different era— it’s fragmented, manual, and opaque. Finding a supplier you can trust often takes months. Shifting production to a new region? Even harder. And with rising tariffs and growing uncertainty in China, that gap is only widening.

That’s why we’re excited to back and co-lead Cavela’s $6.6M seed round.

Cavela makes it radically easier for brands to manufacture physical products by combining AI agents, on-the-ground experts, and a vetted network of over 200,000 factories worldwide. It’s not a marketplace—it’s infrastructure. Brands use Cavela to go from product idea to qualified suppliers in a matter of days. Quotes, samples, negotiations, QA, and delivery, all handled in one system.

The core insight is obvious in hindsight: before you can sell, you have to make. And making has always been the bottleneck. Cavela is changing that. Their AI agents act like a digital sourcing team—searching across thousands of options, managing outreach, and comparing quotes in parallel. On the ground, experienced operators handle inspections and factory visits. Together, they give small and midsize brands leverage that was once reserved for global giants.

Cavela is the kind of company that could only be built by someone like Anthony, who grew up in Southeast Asia in a family that’s worked in global trade for three generations. Anthony has spent over a decade living across Latin America, and has been quietly sourcing for friends and family for years. He also led data science and product teams in startups, giving him the technical range to turn that lived experience into scalable software. When ChatGPT came out, he began using it to automate sourcing workflows. That weekend project eventually became Cavela v0.

We believe the timing couldn’t be better as tariffs have exposed how fragile the status quo really is. Brands that once relied on a single manufacturing hub are scrambling to diversify, but most don’t have the tools or network to do it quickly. Cavela gives them both.

The team comes with a rare mix of technical depth and firsthand knowledge of trade. They’re not just applying AI to a random vertical—they’re rethinking how products get made. The early results are compelling: brands are cutting sourcing time from months to days, lowering production costs by up to 35%, and getting access to premium factories behind household names.

At Susa, we love backing founders building the missing infrastructure—the platforms that turn what used to take 10 people and a dozen spreadsheets into something a two-person team can run in a browser. Cavela fits that mold. What Shopify did for selling, Cavela is doing for making.

We’re proud to be early partners to Anthony and the Cavela team, and excited for what’s ahead. If you’re building a brand or trying to make your supply chain more resilient, this is a team worth knowing.