AI automation startup Nexcade has raised $2.5 million in pre-seed funding as it emerges from stealth, aiming to modernize the freight forwarding industry through agentic AI.
The round was led by Connect Ventures, with participation from MMC Ventures, Entropy Industrial Capital, Inovia, and angel investors Charlie Songhurst and Keith Wallington.
Transforming logistics operations with AI agents
Founded by Dan Bailey and Tasho Kjosev, Nexcade uses AI agents to automate complex workflows in freight forwarding — including pricing, quoting, and rate procurement.
Its platform processes unstructured data from emails, attachments, and customer communications — information that typically never reaches a company’s transport management system (TMS) — and converts it into structured, actionable workflows.
This enables logistics teams to respond faster to quote requests, reduce manual effort, and improve pricing accuracy, while gaining deeper visibility into rate performance and margins.
“While the TMS holds records, most of the real commercial conversation happens outside it,” said Dan Bailey, CEO and co-founder of Nexcade. “We bridge that gap by capturing and structuring the hidden data that drives decisions. That’s the only way to unlock true automation and sustainable revenue growth in freight forwarding.”
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Tackling a manual, fragmented industry
Despite years of digitization, freight forwarding remains one of the most manual and fragmented parts of the logistics sector. Shippers, carriers, brokers, and warehouses all rely on different systems and processes — leading to inefficiency, data inconsistency, and missed revenue opportunities.
Nexcade’s platform tackles these challenges by:
- Unifying scattered data sources across communications and systems
- Handling exceptions automatically, keeping workflows running smoothly
- Turning reactive operations into proactive commercial engines
By automating repetitive and exception-heavy workflows, Nexcade can cut turnaround times from days to minutes and ensure that every rate request is answered.
With freight rates under pressure — as revenues halve and margins fall toward 5% — operational efficiency has become a critical competitive advantage. Nexcade’s automation tools give forwarders a way to improve both service quality and profitability in a challenging market.
Rapid growth ahead
Nexcade plans to expand its customer base tenfold over the next year, deepening relationships with leading freight forwarders and scaling automation volumes as adoption grows.
The company’s first focus area — rate and contract workflows — lays the foundation for broader AI-driven automation across sales, operations, and customer management.
“Rates and contracts underpin the freight forwarding business,” Bailey added. “Starting here delivers the biggest commercial impact while building the foundation for end-to-end automation.”
About Nexcade
Nexcade is a London-based AI automation company transforming the freight forwarding industry. Its agentic AI platform extracts unstructured data from emails and conversations to automate pricing, quoting, and commercial workflows. By unifying fragmented information and managing exceptions intelligently, Nexcade helps logistics teams respond faster, reduce costs, and unlock new revenue opportunities.
