As trade flows between Mexico and the U.S. continue to surge, Cargado CEO and co-founder Matt Silver unveiled Monday a first-of-its-kind invite-only load board for freight moving into and out of Mexico.
Customers are able to use Cargado to book freight faster and more transparently, as the entire negotiation takes place on the platform, Silver said.
“We’re excited to finally be able to share the fact that we’ve been building an invite only cross-border load board,” Silver told FreightWaves in an interview. “Our goal with what we’ve been creating is to build something that allows people to collaborate and communicate and do business together. We hope that people can kind of reframe how they think about the load board concept with what we’re introducing to the market with Cargado. It is purely for cross-border freight.”
Cargado’s platform already has more than 50 logistics customers (brokers, 3PLs and freight forwarders) posting their cross-border freight to get bids from more than 300 cross-border trucking companies.
Freight brokers can post cross-border Mexico freight in the Cagado platform, whether it’s going from Mexico to the U.S., Mexico to Canada, or vice versa.
“As long as it touches Mexico, brokers can post it and trucking companies that have been invited through personal networks or through referrals can bid on that freight, and then they negotiate through the platform,” Silver said. “Once the match happens, the broker goes back into their TMS, sends the rate confirmation, and still runs through the normal compliance checks. But this is a very different experience than what people are used to using today when it comes to how they interact through technology.”
Customers have the ability to post both spot freight and consistent opportunities, such as request for proposals or mini-bids, known as lanes in Cargado, from Canada and the U.S. to Mexico.
Related: US-Mexico trade hits record $415B through first half of year
Brokerages, 3PL or freight forwarders, can sign up on Cargado’s website to join the waitlist and receive a demo of the load board.
Once vetted and added to the Cargado platform, logistics operators pay a fee of $500 per user per month for anyone who wants to post freight.
Cargado’s carrier network includes about 300 U.S.-based trucking companies, comprising 44,000 trucks and 130,000 trailers. The network includes dry vans, reefers, flatbeds, stepdecks, removable goosenecks, double drops and conestogas.
The majority of trucking companies on the Cargado platform are either Customs-Trade Partnership Against Terrorism (C-TPAT) certified or have partner carriers in Mexico who are C-TPAT or OEA certified (Mexico’s version of C-TPAT).
Silver is the former CEO of Forager, a Freighttech startup founded in 2018. The company specialized in cross-border truckload freight matching between the U.S., Mexico and Canada. Silver sold Forager in 2022 to Arrive Logistics.
He grew up working at Coyote Logistics, the brokerage his father Jeff Silver founded in 2006 and sold to UPS in 2015.
Cargado was founded in January by Silver and Rylan Hawkins, without revealing how it would specifically operate in the cross-border space.
Hawkins serves as Cargado’s chief technology officer. He was one of the founding engineers at Convoy, where he served as general manager for two Convoy Go and Convoy for Brokers.
Cargado launched the first version of its load board product on April 1 to a select group of trucking companies and logistics providers.
“I think the industry is ready for better technology. We can thank companies like Convoy for moving the industry forward, getting carriers to start using technology more effectively,” Silver said. “Another thing is that nearshoring is exploding, and as freight brokers try to diversify their business, one of the things that they look to do is to go into Mexico.”
Cargado will eventually evolve into more than a load board for Mexico freight, Silver said.
“We see it developing significantly. We see a more interconnected North American freight market, and we want to help move the industry forward,” Silver said. “Five years from now, our goal is that everybody working at a freight brokerage in some way or another is using or benefiting from Cargado for at least a component of their business, especially when it comes to cross-border freight.”