Nuvocargo raises $12M to digitize the freight logistics industry – TechCrunch

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Despite a whole bunch of billions of {dollars}’ value of products flowing throughout the U.S.-Mexican border annually, the freight industry has remained analog — all sides of the border providing up its personal maze of forms.

Nuvocargo, a digital logistics platform for cross-border commerce, is attempting to modernize the course of. The firm presents an all-in-one service that rolls freight forwarding, customs brokerage, cargo insurance coverage and even commerce financing into one UI-friendly software program and app. Housing all of those providers below one app makes it simpler for firms to monitor their provide chain and offers customs and logistics groups entry to extra centralized data, in accordance to Nuvocargo CEO Deepak Chhugani.

“And you just have one single audit trail in case something goes wrong,” Chhugani advised TechCrunch, including that the course of helps scale back or eradicate the additional prices that include a excessive administrative overhead. It additionally lets clients take a high-level take a look at their operations from inside a single interface, he mentioned.

Chhugani likened the expertise to one thing like Uber Eats, which presents clients the capacity to simply monitor meals orders from restaurant to dwelling.

“Just imagine, because you are dealing with so many different parties, you lose visibility on what’s going on. If you want a snapshot of — what did I spend end-to-end? — you actually have to go through all these email chains or faxes or texts with different providers,” Chhugani defined. “Some of them might be in another country. So [Nuvocargo] just creates more visibility throughout the process, from where the goods literally are to visibility around your finances.”

But Nuvocargo is pondering past the precise motion of products. The firm can also be beginning to provide customs brokerage, complete cross-border cargo insurance coverage and factoring, or short-term account receivable finance. The final of those solves an particularly tough ache level for trucking firms, which typically should wait up to net-90 days to be paid.

The strategy has caught buyers’ eyes: Nearly one yr after saying it had raised a $5.3 million seed round, the firm has closed on a $12 million Series A funding led by QED Investors and with injections from David Velez, Michael Ronen, Raymond Tonsing, FJ Labs and Clocktower. Investors NFX and ALLVP, which participated in the earlier spherical, additionally participated.

The “holy grail” of their new choices, as Chhugani referred to as it, is commerce financing. Because Nuvocargo will have already got a relationship with firms, together with an understanding of credit score and fraud threat, its hope is that it will possibly provide monetary merchandise at a aggressive fee.

This is what attracted QED Investors, a agency that usually focuses on monetary know-how relatively than logistics and trucking.

“After speaking with [Deepak] and seeing the connection points and parallels between what we were looking at in e-commerce and the challenges of actually getting goods across border, the fintech spark went off in my own head,” Lauren Connolley Morton, a associate at QED, mentioned in an interview with TechCrunch. “The opportunities for factoring, for lending, for insuring goods are all very much right up our alley.”

Although Chhugani declined to disclose Nuvocargo’s valuation after this most up-to-date spherical of funding, it’s clear there’s loads of room to develop into the logistics industry’s big and seemingly disaggregated worth chain.



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