Nexcade, a London startup building AI agents for freight forwarders, raised a $6 million seed round to expand software that drafts quotes, procures rates and enters shipment orders, while leaving final decisions to human operators.
The company is targeting freight forwarders that still manage quoting and bookings through email. Its software offers a more focused, human-in-the-loop approach than the end-to-end automation used by large carriers.
The round: Project A Ventures led the funding, with participation from Connect Ventures, MMC Ventures, and Entropy Industrial Capital, Angel investors from Vanguard Logistics, n8n, Altana, Sedna, UiPath, and Cleo also joined the round.
Nexcade closed a $2.5 million pre-seed led by Connect Ventures less than a year ago. The company says annual recurring revenue has more than tripled since the start of the year, which is what justified a full second round this soon.
What it does: The software reads customer emails, attachments, and spreadsheets to prepare quotations, procure rates, enter shipment orders, and support customer communications. It then hands the final decision back to a human operator.
Nexcade has also launched Atlas, an analytics tool that flags where AI can cut operational bottlenecks. Customers include XPO, Zencargo, Cardinal Global Logistics, and CargoTrans.
CEO Dan Bailey previously served as COO of freight communications platform Sedna. CTO Tasho Kjosev was a technical lead at Palantir. Bailey told FreightWaves that many companies still rely on manual work even after automating parts of the process. “Half of the forwarders we saw were taking automated data and putting it back into spreadsheets.”
