Letter From The CEO: Nuvocargo Raises Series A

Less than one year ago we announced our $5.3M seed round. Today, I’m excited to announce Nuvocargo’s $12M Series A led by Lauren Morton at QED Investors. New investors joining this round include David Velez (Founder/CEO, Nubank), Michael Ronen (Branded/SoftBank, who led Flexport’s $1B Series D), FJ Labs, Clocktower, Karim Atiyeh (Founder/CTO, Ramp), Raymond Tonsing (Caffeinated Capital), Satya Patel (Homebrew), Sebastian Castro (Founder, Kushki) and more. We’re also thrilled to welcome back existing investors NFX, ALLVP, Magma Partners, MAYA Capital, One Way Ventures, and Ride Ventures as participants in the round.

We feel fortunate to have brought on to the team some of the world’s best investors who have personally founded or scaled some of the most successful startups in our geography and in our industry. 

Nuvocargo is at an inflection point. Having launched 18 months ago, we expect to generate tens of millions of dollars in annual revenue in 2021, our second full year in business. We grew revenues by 25x in 2020 and we’ve consistently grown revenues above 30% MoM since launching in late 2019. 

I’m incredibly proud of the team we’ve built so far; today, our team is 35 employees strong between the USA and Mexico, and we expect to grow to over 100+ in the coming 12 months. This means we will be spending a lot of time and effort trying to hire the best teammates we can find who are excited about modernizing trade across the Americas and joining a high growth startup at the intersection of the USA and Latin America. Specifically, we will be using the funds to invest more aggressively in engineering, product, design, analytics, and marketing while continuing to invest in sales & operations. 

We were fortunate to have multiple investors to choose from in our Series A. QED was founded by the team that founded and built Capital One (NYSE: COF) into a $60B+ publicly traded bank in the USA. They have been critical & major investors in some of the world's most successful financial services companies, as well as the most successful Latin American startups such as Nubank ($25B+), Loft ($2.2B), Kavak ($4B+), Credijusto, Konfio, QuintoAndar, and many more. Nuvocargo is excited to partner with Lauren and QED because very few investors globally understand how to build iconic $60B+ businesses while also having had a front row seat to building and scaling the first wave of highly successful Latin American tech unicorns. 

Not only does QED understand our unique intersection between the USA and Latin America, but also they bring a very specific expertise that complements our team to achieve our vision: financial services. 

While on the surface Nuvocargo appears to be primarily a logistics company, our vision has always been to build an all-in-one digital platform to simplify trade for businesses across the Americas. One of the biggest components of that vision is deeply rooted in the movement of money and payments for the international supply chain. Nuvocargo will soon offer products and services that help truckers, SMB’s, and businesses across countries with multiple pain points that go beyond the actual movement of goods, namely cargo insurance, working capital financing, trade finance, inventory loans, and more. We estimate that the market for these products & services just for trade between the USA & Mexico is over $200B+ combined, and many times that size for trade between the USA and Latin America. 

Building Nuvocargo into a multi-product platform (freight, customs, insurance, trade finance) that can help customers with more than just moving their freight is an exciting challenge, and we believe QED is the perfect partner to help us achieve this vision.

If you are excited about joining a startup that is scaling from dozens of teammates to hundreds in the coming years and building the future of trade across the Americas, join our team! We are excited to meet you and have roles open across every team you can think of. It is still very early days at Nuvocargo - come build the future of trade with us!

Onwards,

Deepak