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Digital cargo company Nowports announced a new US$60 million investment round, one of the largest Series B in Latin America so far.
This new round of investment was led by Tiger Global, SoftBank and DST. Previous investors Mouro Capital, monashees, Base10 Partners, Broadhaven Ventures y Foundation Capital also participated.
The Monterrey-based startup had recently raised a US$23 million Series A in a round led by monashees. The round was extended with an additional US$8 million from investors Justin Mateen, Andy Shah, and Dominik Palsanik. Nowports’ 2019 seed round series was raised when it graduated from Y Combinator’s W19 generation.
Last September, Nowports had also announced its expansion to Brazil. The company seeks to establish itself in the promising Brazilian maritime transportation market, which is the largest in terms of volume in Latam. Nowports currently has offices in Mexico, Chile, Colombia, Uruguay, Peru and Brazil.
On the record for Contxto, Alfonso de los Ríos, Nowports’ co founder and CEO, shared that besides using the new capital for an aggressive expansion in Brazil, the company will also use it to “keep increasing our financing services, imports now, pay later offering, and digitizing our customers’ insurance coverage”.
A necessary solution for international logistics
Nowports focuses on automating warehouses with sensors to track connected shipments in real-time. It wants to become the go-to logistics intermediation option for its clients, who move between 10 and 15 maritime containers per month and come from the retail, automotive, and manufacturing industries.
The main commercial flows that Nowports focuses on are between Asia and the main Latin American ports, as well as ground transportation from the U.S. to Mexico.
According to De los Ríos, those who need to import or export merchandise depend on logistics activities, which require intensive capital. For this reason, Nowports also offers the import now, pay later model, a credit system that uses the merchandise as collateral.
“The pandemic allowed us to grow,” he said. This situation resulted “in a breaking point in the manual processes of logistics teams; they realized that what they had been doing for 50 years could now be done with a digital platform like Nowports ”.
Nowports was founded by De los Ríos and his partner, Maximiliano Casal from Uruguay, when they were 19 and 27 years old. The company currently has about 300 full-time employees divided into 7 countries.
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