Issue #23: We’ve got new swag, and some new funding!
We raised more money, got some new swag, and have some new partners who are going to help accelerate Cargado’s growth.
Big News
We’re very excited to announce our recently closed $6.8M seed round, led by Primary Venture Partners with new investor RyderVentures, and participation from existing investors Ironspring Ventures, Zenda Capital, Wischoff Ventures, and Proeza Ventures.
I’ll cut to the chase with the headline news here: no, we still aren’t sharing what we’re building, yes we have customers paying to use our product, and yes we got some really cool swag.
How I met Primary Venture Partners
I first came across Zach Fredericks from Primary Venture Partners on X/Twitter, ranting into the ether that freight needs better technology. We knew of each other in passing, from the internet, but hadn’t ever met. Then, early into building Cargado, I was connected with another investor from Primary, who looped in Zach to have a conversation with me about what we’re building. The email started with “Hey Matt - long time fan from afar” and I knew this was the investor for Cargado.
I learned a lot about the type of investors you want at the table during my time building Forager. I had some around the table who had the experience, had seen great companies succeed and others fail, and could help guide the team as a board member through some of those eventual ups and downs. I didn’t necessarily listen to a lot of that advice, stubbornly, and have reflected back on those conversations in my post about lessons learned.
I knew I had the right pre-seed investors around the table but, as we started to build the business, I met Zach and Brad Svrluga, co-founder and managing partner at Primary Venture Partners, and I realized they had an incredibly powerful setup that could help us accelerate things dramatically. Zach had four years of experience at Loadsmart and knows the industry through and through. Brad has spent the last twenty-five years investing in startups and has seen it all. I was seeking out that experience to add to the table and found it in Brad.
The other thing I learned about that gave Primary an advantage was their Impact team. As I was early into my technical co-founder search, Brad and Zach offered to use their talent sourcing team to help me find a co-founder. They sourced a dozen candidates and I met with several, all of whom were incredibly talented and qualified. They did this with no strings attached, nearly six months before eventually leading this round.
Even before closing out this round, Brad had the impact team jump in and start supporting. They helped rework our financial model, their GTM team started helping me think about pricing strategy for our first product, and walking through how to actually structure SaaS deals (something that was new for me coming from freight), and have supported us in so many other ways already in the last few weeks alone. They’re also currently running multiple recruiting processes for us, including our a critical leadership role that we’re in the process of finalizing, building out our engineering team, and setting up our search for a Border Partnerships Manager role in El Paso.
The impact has been incredibly clear and the support has been amazing in the last few weeks.
Why take on more capital? Didn’t you just raise?
We raised our pre-seed round in Q4 of 2023 and have kept the team small with our operations incredibly lean. It’s just the six of us right now. We still had most of our capital left when this new funding opportunity came in and, as someone who was close to running out of money multiple times at Forager, I never wanted to be in that position again. I heard Parker Conrad talk about this on The Social Radars podcast and I’m of the mindset of having the cash and being smart about how we spend it.
When I think about smart spending, I think about swag. We got some really cool swag through John Howard and the team at Slingshot. I got tired of wearing my PLEASE ADVISE hat in every podcast or video recording, and so now we have our own Cargado hats. Plus, we’ve got some really fun t-shirts we’ll be giving to our earliest users. By earliest users, I mean paying customers and their partners who engage in the product. Customers are already seeing success using our product in the month that it’s been live, which has been incredibly exciting.
We also had the opportunity to take on some capital from RyderVentures. Mike Plasencia, Managing Director, has been great to work with on the venture team and summarized their belief with the following: “Growth in nearshoring will accelerate the adoption of disruptive technologies and business models for cross-border and intra-Mexico supply chains. Cargado is at the forefront of this enabling transformation. Through RyderVentures, we’re excited to both be an investor and early development partner.”
This also means I don’t have to have any more investor conversations for a long time! I get to focus on working with all our customers and various users, and collaborating with our engineers on how our product gets built. The team moves with so much agility when it comes to customer feedback and we see it when other customers see those changes and respond in reassuring ways.
Problems to solve
Where do I even start? I spent seventeen years of my life brokering freight. My past decade was focused entirely on moving freight across the U.S.-Mexico border. Like I’ve said before, we’re building tools to help create a better experience for everyone involved in cross-border freight. The way brokers and carriers interact, how they collaborate on a load or lane, how the customs broker plays into it, and how data is shared across all these parties – it’s all in play. There are way too many messages flying around via WhatsApp and email with no structure and we continue to believe that there’s a better way to do this work.
The more time we’ve spent talking to brokers across the industry, the more common feedback we’ve seen around the main challenges they see and the results they’re looking to achieve. Same with carriers. Everyone wants to make more money, grow their business, keep their trucks moving, and spend less time asking for follow-up on an email. A lot of logistics providers are investing in their tech stack, with a mix of those who are building and those who decided to buy. We’re excited to be solving problems for companies in both categories.
P.S.: We’re hiring!
If you’re passionate about cross-border freight or about logistics and supply chain in general, and love building technology, you should reach out! As we start to see some growth happen early into this process, we’re starting to think about strategic hiring, and so I’d be remiss if I didn’t include a few of the roles we’re looking to fill: