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.