We’re excited to announce our investment in Nexcade, an AI automation platform built specifically for freight forwarders — helping the teams who keep global trade moving work faster, smarter, and more profitably.

We first partnered with co-founders Dan Bailey and Tasho Kjosev earlier this year while Nexcade was still in stealth. Since then, they’ve moved fast — building an exceptional team, landing flagship customers, and proving the value of their product in live operations.

Freight forwarding is the invisible backbone of global trade — but under the surface it’s messy. Every shipment involves a web of manual steps, unpredictable exceptions, and constant coordination across carriers, customers, and agents. Most of that work lives in unstructured communication — emails, attachments, and back-and-forth messages — that traditional systems don’t see.

Nexcade is built for this reality: a multi-agent orchestration layer designed to automate the complex, non-linear workflows that power global freight. The company’s first product focuses on quotations and bookings, the revenue-generating heart of a freight forwarder’s operation. By automating this process end-to-end, Nexcade helps forwarders quote faster, win more business, and improve margins.

While RPA and workflow tools have been tried before, they’ve struggled to cope with the reality of freight: no two shipments are the same and exceptions are the rule. Nexcade starts from the opposite end — using real operational data to automate narrow, high-value tasks first, then expanding the agent’s scope as trust and ROI grow.

Proof of this customer value started well before this announcement. While in stealth, Nexcade partnered with early customers including Zencargo, Cardinal Global Logistics, and XPO, and is already seeing rapid adoption, with workflow volumes growing over 40% month-on-month.

Dan and Tasho are a complementary pairing we love to back. Dan brings deep domain insight from years working with logistics teams, obsessing over real-world workflows and customer problems. Tasho adds world-class technical leadership from UnlikelyAI and Palantir, with a track record of building cutting-edge AI systems. Together, they’ve assembled an exceptional team with experience from Xeneta, Raft, Gravity Sketch, Improbable, and UnlikelyAI — combining freight know-how with serious AI engineering.

Why now? AI has reached a tipping point where it can reliably interpret natural language and automate the exception-heavy processes that define freight. That shift enables a new kind of software — not a system of record that stores what happened, but intelligent agents that sit upstream, understanding customer interactions as they happen and acting on them.

When automation lives where work actually occurs — inside the messy, unstructured flow — it stops being a back-office cost play and becomes a true commercial lever: faster responses, higher win rates, better pricing, and stronger margins.

That’s why Nexcade resonates with us. It captures the unstructured work that has always sat outside traditional systems and turns it into dependable, compounding automation. In a thin-margin industry where time kills deals and inefficiency hits the P&L immediately, that’s a step-change.

We led a $2.5m pre-seed round, alongside great people at MMC Ventures, Entropy Industrial Capital, Inovia, and angels including Charlie Songhurst and Keith Wallington. We’re proud to partner with Dan and Tasho as they build the next generation of automation for global freight forwarders. In a market full of hype, their customer focus and pace of execution stand out — and we couldn’t be more excited to support them on the journey ahead.

Freight forwarders keep the world moving. Nexcade will help them move faster, smarter, and more profitably.