The digital freight forwarder of Latin America, Nowports has raised up to $150 million in their recent Series C funding round. This increased the company’s worth to a whopping $1.1 billion. For those in the dark, automated freight forwarders utilize digital tools to improve efficiencies and communication in the shipping process, along with certain other benefits. This further helps make punctual and more accurate shipments. This can often be considered a challenge for many companies due to the lack of efficiency and transparency.
Only half a year after the Mexico-based company, Monterey announced its $60 million funding, Nowports got this huge back up from SoftBank Latin America Fund. This is the third time they have hosted an equity raise, gathering a total of $240 million since 2018. Earlier, in July 2021, the company got $16 million in funding from the Series A funding round.
Considering that this company was valued at only $80 million in March 2021, this is a steep valuation jump. Only in the first quarter of this year, their revenue climb was over 12 times, year-over-year. It also secured a 10x growth in customers served and containers shipped.
Its first seed round was in 2019, from the 2019 batch of Y-Combinator, with the primary goal of revolutionizing the freight forwarding business with more focus on SMEs. Their service helps track the entire journey of freight shipments across Latin America. With time, they have introduced many new features and recently started automating insurance policies and inventory financing.
Simply out, Nowports is trying to streamline all import-export processes and improve the overall visibility of Latin American companies’ supply chains with more available information. Just last year, they released an inventory financing tool that can help customers get more merchandise but pay later. This will allow the companies to increase their imports and exports. They are planning to offer such features in every country by the end of this year. Their main plan is to become a one-stop shop for all companies they are serving.
Nowports introduced their services to Panama, later expanding to Chile, Concepcion, Colombia and Medellin in the first quarter of 2022. Today, they manage 10 active offices in seven separate countries consisting of Peru, Brazil, Panama and Mexico with over 500 employees. With the new money they have raised, they plan to hire more employees, mainly engineers to technologically make their software more advanced. They also plan to expand further into more cities and build more offices in countries it already exists in. as of now, they have planned to open in Chile, Mexico and Brazil.
With them, Tiger Global, Broadhaven Ventures, Base10 Partners, Mouro Capital, Foundation Capital and Monashees also participated in the latest round. You would also find names like Alex Bouaziz from Deel, Ricardo Amper from Incode Roger Laughlin from Kavak and Danial Vogel from Bitso there. Managing partner of Softbank Latin America Fund, Juan Franck is very happy with their funding and quite impressed by what the company has done with IoT, big data and AI to enhance the import-export chain