Nexcade exits stealth with $2.5M to automate global freight forwarding

London-based Nexcade, an AI automation company for freight forwarders, has
raised $2.5 million in pre-seed funding and is emerging from stealth. The round
was led by Connect Ventures with participation from MMC Ventures, Entropy Industrial Capital, Inovia, and angels, including Charlie Songhurst and Keith Wallington.

Nexcade develops agentic AI automation for
logistics teams, simplifying pricing, quoting, and rate procurement to help
forwarders operate faster and secure more business. Its AI agents extract
unstructured work from emails and conversations outside the TMS and convert it
into structured, automated workflows, enhancing rate management, improving win
rates, and providing greater data visibility.

Founded by Dan Bailey and Tasho Kjosev, the team brings deep freight and AI
experience from companies such as Xeneta, Raft, Gravity Sketch, Improbable, and
UnlikelyAI.

Freight forwarding is the connective tissue of
global trade, yet despite growing digitisation, it still relies on manual work,
email, and fragmented data from shippers, carriers, agents, brokers, and
warehouses, all with different formats and systems. Most automation fails in
this environment due to customer-specific requirements, inconsistent data, and
constant exceptions.

Nexcade is built for that reality. Its AI
unifies scattered inputs, handles edge cases, and keeps critical workflows
running when other systems stall. The core issue is unstructured communication
with endless emails, attachments, and back-and-forth messages that never reach
the TMS, so quote requests go unanswered and pricing often depends on tribal
knowledge.

Nexcade captures that hidden information, structures it, and drives it
through automated workflows so every request gets a response, turnaround drops
from days to minutes, and teams shift from reactive firefighting to proactively
driving revenue and margin.

These gains matter as forwarders face
unprecedented pressure. Freight rates continue to compress after record
volatility, leaving many with revenues halved over the past year and net
margins near 5 per cent, so inefficiency cuts straight into profit. At the same
time, AI has reached a tipping point where it can reliably interpret natural
language and automate exception-heavy workflows. Economic strain plus
technological readiness make this the moment for change.

Nexcade’s CEO and co-founder, Dan Bailey, said
the TMS may be the system of record for customers, but much of the
conversation, decision-making, and data that drive freight never enter it. That
gap is where revenue leaks and service quality breaks down. He added:

Bridging
that gap is the only way to unlock real automation and enable the revenue growth and operational resilience forwarders
need in today’s market. Rates and contracts underpin freight forwarding, and
are especially pertinent in the current environment. Starting here enables the
biggest commercial impact for our customers while building the core grounding for future automation for our
customers.

Looking
forward, Nexcade plans to grow its customer base tenfold over the next 12
months, strengthen partnerships with leading forwarders to reinvent commercial
workflows, and expand workflow volumes as adoption accelerates.