Announcing our investment in Cargado 🎉

We’re excited to publicly announce our investment into Cargado! Joining forces with our friends at Ironspring, Wischoff, Proeza and other angels, we're committed to backing Cargado's mission to revolutionize cross-border logistics.

We first spoke to the team back in August when it was just an idea. The co-founders, seasoned professionals with decades of experience in the industry, captivated us with their vision of seamlessly connecting supply chain operators with the goal of building a unified cross-border network.

Matt Silver spent his entire career in the logistics space, starting at Coyote Logistics where he helped establish their Mexico department. He then moved on to build his first venture-backed freight tech company Forager, which was acquired by Arrive Logistics in 2022. This move accelerated their growth and positioned Arrive to become a leader in the North American cross-border logistics market.

Rylan Hawkins was one of the first software engineers at Convoy and scaled multiple business units and product lines, most notably Convoy Go and Convoy for Brokers. His experiences gave him visibility and sensibility towards understanding what it takes to build technology for freight operators.

Our extensive research, which involved speaking with freight brokers, shippers, and carriers, has uncovered significant challenges at the heart of cross-border logistics. We've identified two key drivers exacerbating these issues:

1. Current State of Affairs: The US-MX over-the-road transportation network lacks coherence, facing a threefold problem:

   1. Freight Brokers: They face difficulties in proactively securing shipping capacity and pricing Mexico freight effectively. They also struggle to collect accurate data in a timely fashion.

   2. Shippers: They lack access to real-time visibility and pricing data in their cross-border freight, making it difficult for them to make informed procurement decisions.

   3. Carriers: They struggle to expand their shipper/broker network and access demand for better-paying freight from new customers.

2. Macro Tailwinds: On a broader scale, there are external forces intensifying the need for enhanced connectivity:

   1. Growing Demand: As made evident from the ongoing developments of the Red Sea, unforeseen external events will continue to burden an already delicate network of operators who move goods around the world. Hence, the demand for cross-border road freight is expected to surge significantly in the coming decade.

      

   2. Complex Logistics & Trust Issues: The intricate nature of logistics, compounded by a prevalent lack of trust among stakeholders, hinders the fulfillment of the nearshoring potential.

      

This requires better alignment (through building trust) between the stakeholders that make up the sum of the regional logistics and transportation market, which touches many adjacent industries like e-commerce, manufacturing, and distribution.

Cargado is solving this by effectively bringing these different stakeholders together and enabling them to efficiently manage their supply chain in a cost-effective manner.

Our investment reflects our commitment towards backing entrepreneurs who are building a more resilient supply chain for tomorrow. Congrats to Matt, Rylan and the rest of the team on this milestone!

If you want to stay in-the-know on anything that touches cross-border logistics, we highly recommend that you subscribe to Matt Silver’s newsletter and read his latest post which expands on the thesis at Cargado:

For more information on Cargado’s launch, here’s the press release.

Onwards!