Nexcade, the AI automation company for freight forwarders, announced it has raised £1.9 million in pre-seed funding and is emerging from stealth.
Nexcade builds agentic automation for logistics teams, automating pricing, quoting and procurement workflows to enable forwarders to move faster and win more business. The round was led by Connect Ventures, with participation from MMC Ventures, Entropy Industrial Capital, Inovia and angel investors including Charlie Songhurst and Keith Wallington.
Freight forwarding is the connective layer that underpins global trade, but despite ever-increasing digitisation, the industry is still reliant on manual processes, email and fragmented data driven by the wide network of players in every shipment. Shippers, carriers, agents, customs brokers and warehouses each bring different data formats, systems, and processes.
Existing automation falls down because this environment is messy: customer-specific requirements, inconsistent data, and exceptions that don’t fit rigid process automation. Nexcade is built for this reality. Its AI products are designed to unify fragmented inputs, handle complexity and edge cases, and keep critical workflows running when other systems break.
At the heart of the problem is unstructured communication: endless emails, attachments, and back-and-forth messages that rarely make it into the TMS. Today, as many as 30% of quote requests typically go unanswered, and pricing and margins still depend on the “tribal knowledge” of a few experienced operators. Nexcade captures that hidden information, structures it, and drives it through automated workflows. Every request gets answered, response times drop to minutes instead of days, and teams can shift to a proactive approach to driving revenue and margin.
These gains matter at a time of unprecedented pressure on forwarders. Freight rates continue to compress on the back of record volatility, leaving many forwarders with revenues cut in half in the last 12 months, with net margins as low as 5%, inefficiencies cut straight into profit. At the same time, AI has reached a tipping point: for the first time, it can reliably interpret natural language and automate exception-heavy workflows. The combination of economic strain and technological readiness makes this the moment for change.
Since launching in stealth, Nexcade has seen strong demand from leading forwarders looking to reimagine their commercial workflows, partnering with early customers such as Zencargo, Cardinal Global Logistics, and XPO. Nexcade is growing rapidly, seeing a 40% monthly growth in workflow volumes and plans to 10x their customer count over the next 12 months.
