Cargado, a freight-tech firm, revealed on Monday that it has raised $6.8 million in initial money, which it plans to utilize to grow its staff and improve its offering.
Primary Venture Partners led the seed round, which included new investment RyderVentures and current investors Ironspring Ventures, Zenda Capital, Wischoff Ventures, and Proeza Ventures.
In January, Cargado obtained pre-seed finance totaling $3 million.
In October 2023, chief technology officer Rylan Hawkins and CEO Matt Silver created Cargado. Although Silver would not specify how Cargado will currently function in the cross-border market, he did state that the industry is ready for innovations in logistics technology.
“With cross-border freight, we see so many different opportunities and problems,” Silver remarked. “I have a really strong understanding of all the problems that go into every part of the process of moving freight between the U.S. and Mexico. We’re excited to be building technology that operators involved in the cross-border process can leverage to do their jobs better, to make more money and grow their businesses, and to generally be able to be more efficient and successful.”
Principal at Primary Venture Partners Zach Fredericks stated that Silver has been on his radar ever since he started the venture-backed FreightTech startup Forager in Chicago in 2018.
Fredericks explained to FreightWaves that “at Primary Venture Partners, our investment thesis is built around investing in the technology that reduces the transaction costs of building a more durable supply chain.”
Fredericks worked for Loadsmart, an on-demand freight marketplace, for more than three years as a product manager until joining Primary Venture Partners in January 2023.
Fredericks expressed his belief that software, “We think there’s just this tremendous opportunity for software, for AI, for data infrastructure, for marketplaces, for financial technology to reduce a lot of that pain that comes with building more durability and optionality into your supply chain,”
“One of the biggest things we have our eyes on is nearshoring. The growth in trade between Mexico and the U.S. and Canada has been pretty remarkable in the last couple of years. We think that with all the foreign direct investment moving into Mexico, that nearshoring is not going to change. Right now, we just don’t see enough technology being built to streamline logistics between Mexico and the U.S. We’re really excited about the broader vision of just streamlining North American logistics into a platform where a lot of the complexity and pain of finding new parties to do business with for transportation is simpler and results in less cost.”
More data engineers, along with more personnel in sales, accounting, and support, will be hired with the seed money, according to Silver. At the moment, Cargado employs roughly six people and is headquartered in Laredo, Texas, Chicago, Atlanta, and Seattle.
According to Silver, Cargado intends to establish an office in Monterrey, Mexico, in addition to its planned Chicago headquarters.
In reality, Cargado introduced its as-yet-undisclosed product to its expanding user base approximately a month ago.
“The feedback has been exceptionally positive. One of the comments that we’ve heard a lot has been that the product is built in an intuitive way,”, according to Silver. “I’ve spent 17 years in freight. Rylan was at Convoy for seven and a half years, so we have a really good understanding of the ins and outs of freight, and what an operator needs to be able to do and communicate in the information that they want to be able to store and share. We were very intentional about making sure that it was built that way.”