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Our Investment in Cargado
We’re thrilled to announce our investment in Cargado’s Series A. Generational companies often emerge from – or help drive – major macroeconomic shifts, and global trade is in the midst of one such transformation. The pandemic laid bare deep vulnerabilities in supply chains, underscoring the urgent need for new physical, digital, financial, and data infrastructure to support the rise of trade across the Americas.
This shift is only gaining momentum. De-risking, rising tariffs, and the reorganization of trade blocs are accelerating the realignment of global commerce. As we wrote in our May 2023 update: “Broken trading lines lead to more instability… as U.S. companies continue to re-shore and near-shore economic activity, there will be opportunities for software that supports commercial trade between the U.S. and its neighbors in Mexico and Canada.”
Nowhere is this shift more visible than in U.S.-Mexico trade. In 2024, bilateral trade reached $839.9 billion — a 5% increase year-over-year — with more than 70% of goods transported by truck. Each day, millions of SKUs move across the border, managed by a highly fragmented ecosystem of shippers, carriers, and brokers.
Despite this scale, over 85% of shipments are still coordinated through emails, phone calls, and spreadsheets — leading to inefficiencies, costly errors, and billions in lost revenue from deadhead miles, delays, and breakdowns in coordination. Nearly 30% of trucks, for example, cross the border empty due to poor visibility and weak network connectivity.
Enter Cargado. Matt Silver, Rylan Hawkins, and their team are building the foundational data infrastructure platform for North American freight. Matt brings deep logistics expertise from his time at Coyote and Forager, while Rylan’s technical leadership at Convoy adds the engineering rigor needed to scale a solution of this complexity. Together, they’ve assembled a team that blends domain depth with technical excellence — exactly what it takes to solve a problem this fragmented and entrenched.
Cargado’s first product is a subscription-based load board designed for brokers, delivering real-time visibility into trucks and shipments. It enables smarter matching and optimization across pricing, timing, and capacity. Just a year in, they’ve onboarded over 200 brokers and 650 carriers — covering more than 100,000 trucks and 300,000 trailers. With 17,000 brokers in the U.S. and another 6,000 in Mexico, they’re only beginning to tap into the opportunity. As the network expands, Cargado becomes the system of record for cross-border trade — unlocking monetization opportunities across data, payments, pricing, and fraud prevention.
Freight fraud alone is a $7 billion annual problem in North America — and Cargado is tackling it head-on. Their commitment to trust and transparency is already saving brokers’ customers hundreds of thousands in avoided losses. By seamlessly integrating into daily workflows and eliminating inefficiencies, Cargado not only saves time and money, but unlocks entirely new ways to support freight operations beyond the initial transaction.
The urgency for such tools is only growing. With tariff volatility, geopolitical realignments, and industrial real estate in northern Mexico now exceeding 95% occupancy, trade patterns are shifting rapidly. Chinese manufacturers are establishing footholds in Mexico to re-route exports, accelerating cross-border flows. In this environment, Cargado equips businesses to track tariffs in real time, respond quickly, and win more business. From plant to port to customer, they’re streamlining the entire movement of goods.
In a world defined by uncertainty, companies with better data and systems will lead. Cargado delivers both — transforming one of the most essential, yet under-digitized sectors of the economy. We’re proud to back the team as they build the next foundational layer of cross-border commerce.