Nuvocargo, a trucking managed marketplace, announced that it has raised $5.3 million seed round of funding led by Silicon Valley-based NFX and Mexico City-based ALLVP.
The seed round also saw participation from One Way Ventures, Maya Capital, Magma Partners, the co-founders of Rappi, the former CMO of Cabify and other angels.
The company will use the seed funding to prioritize early hires in product, operations, finance and engineering in its New York and Mexico offices on its fully bilingual team.
Chhugani joined Y Combinator’s W18 class with a startup called The Lobby, which sought to connect job seekers to personalized coaches. He raised $1.2 million for the startup, but decided to pivot into logistics and work on Nuvocargo. The change in direction was fairly natural for the Ecuador-raised entrepreneur, who cited his family’s previous work in the Latin American logistics industry.
When the time came to pivot, Chhugani offered investors their money back. Some chose to leave, but Y Combinator elected to stay under the new promise of digitizing trucking between Mexico and the U.S. Nuvocargo says that the $5.3 million seed is its first round, and what they’ve raised to date. Investors who stayed in from The Lobby are part of this round for Nuvocargo.
To the company’s knowledge, U.S.-Mexico trucking is within the top five biggest trade lanes in the world, with 6.5 million trucking shipments going between Mexico and the U.S. every year. Notably, 80% of all the goods transported between the U.S. and Mexico move by truck.
Nuvocargo’s free software digitizes the different steps with timestamps, geo tracking and document housing in a centralized cloud-based dashboard, providing a snapshot understanding of every step of a cross border shipment. Customers can request new shipments using Nuvocargo using a WhatsApp integration, email or SMS.
The 15-person startup wants to house the entire shipping process within its tracking software, simplifying the customer experience. The customer, Chhugani says, is any company that needs to move goods between Mexico and the U.S., and he notes that Nuvocargo is working with dozens of customers ranging from beverage companies to multi-billion-dollar corporations — though he declined to specify who.
In the current age of the coronavirus pandemic, Nuvocargo says it is focusing significant efforts on working with companies that are transporting essential goods to aid in the supply crisis.
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