Nexcade is a London-based startup bringing agentic AI automation to the global freight forwarding industry. Founded by Dan Bailey and Tasho Kjosev, the team brings deep freight and AI experience from companies including Xeneta, Raft, Gravity Sketch, Improbable, and UnlikelyAI. The company emerged from stealth in late 2025 to attack a specific, high-value bottleneck in freight forwarding: the commercial workflows of pricing, quoting, and rate procurement that still run largely on email and manual coordination.
Freight forwarders sit between shippers and carriers, arranging the movement of goods across complex multi-modal routes. A huge amount of their commercial work, requesting rates, comparing carrier quotes, building customer pricing, and responding to inquiries, happens in unstructured channels like email and chat that live entirely outside the transportation management system. That unstructured work is slow, error-prone, and invisible to analytics, which limits how fast forwarders can respond and how well they can optimize win rates.
Nexcade's agentic AI extracts that unstructured work from emails and conversations and converts it into structured, automated workflows. Its agents handle rate management, automate quote generation, and surface data visibility that was previously trapped in inboxes. The aim is to let forwarders operate faster, win more business, and make better commercial decisions with data they could not previously see.
Nexcade raised $2.5 million (approximately £1.9 million) in pre-seed funding led by Connect Ventures, with participation from MMC Ventures, Entropy Industrial Capital, Inovia, and angels including Charlie Songhurst and Keith Wallington. Despite being early-stage, the company already partners with established forwarders such as Zencargo, Cardinal Global Logistics, and XPO, and reports roughly 40% monthly growth in workflow volumes. Nexcade plans to use the funding to deepen its product and rapidly expand its customer base, positioning agentic AI as the new commercial layer for freight forwarding.