Nexcade, which builds AI agents for freight forwarders, has raised £4.5 million in a seed round led by Project A Ventures, with Connect Ventures, MMC Ventures and Entropy Industrial Capital also joining. The round also included angel investors from logistics and AI companies, including freight executives and founders from Vanguard Logistics, n8n, Altana, Sedna, UiPath and Cleo.
Logistics is one of the world's largest industries at 11% of global GDP, and is under increasing pressure from political unrest, instability and supply chain disruptions. Freight forwarders sit at the operational crux of this complexity, coordinating shipments across customers, carriers, agents, warehouses and customs teams, much of it still handled across emails, attachments, spreadsheets and disconnected systems. This has made the work difficult to automate with prior software, since operators need to read requests, check rates, spot exceptions, apply margin rules and decide which supplier or service to trust, and every shipment, customer and lane carries different context. Nexcade builds AI agents that work inside these forwarding workflows, reading customer requests, understanding shipment context, asking clarifying questions, procuring rates and preparing quotes, with users staying in control throughout the process.
Since coming out of stealth in October 2025, Nexcade has grown from early design partnerships into live production deployments with leading forwarders including XPO, Zencargo, Cardinal Global Logistics, CargoTrans and others across Europe and the US, and has more than tripled ARR since the start of the year as existing customers expand their deployment across new divisions. Nexcade is also launching Atlas, a data insights tool that analyses communication data to show where teams spend time, where processes break down and where AI agents can have the largest commercial effect.
The new funding will help Nexcade grow its product, team and customer base across the UK, Europe and the US. The company is also launching new agents for customer service, pricing and tendering, alongside its existing quoting and booking agents, which handle spot quotes and shipment order entry.
Our AI agents are built for specific forwarding jobs. Each agent understands the shipment context, has the tools it needs, and can be tuned to how each customer works. That helps teams respond faster, protect margin and win more business. The market has moved quickly from AI curiosity to AI urgency. Forwarders know they need to use AI, but many are still working out where it will create the most value. Atlas gives them a new lens to find tangible and significant commercial impact.
What makes freight forwarding such a compelling market for AI is not just the amount of manual work. It is the context needed to do that work well. Every quote, rate request and exception depends on information spread across systems, emails, customer history and commercial judgement. Nexcade is building agents that capture and apply that context inside real forwarding workflows. Dan, Tasho and the team have moved from thesis to customer traction at remarkable speed. We are excited to back them as they build the AI workflow layer for global freight.
