Inside Nuvocargo: The AI Agents Taking Over North American Freight

No, that's, that's really good.

I want to talk about the outcomes over tools.

That seems like a, a big philosophy internally at the company.

We've even been seeing many people talk about services is the new software, if you will.

So I'm curious of how you come up with that philosophy, and then how did you pressure test that with your customers?

Yeah.

So, uh, I think I talked about this on a recent other kind of writeup we did with, with, with another investor friend, Luke.

Um, Nuvo Cargo's strategy has always been, uh, basically driving outcomes and not selling software tools, and that has many names in the venture world, right? It used to be tech-enabled services.

Uh, now it might be full stack AI native services.

It, it's all similar, and so that's always been our philosophy.

"Hey, we are the freight broker.

We are the customs broker." That means we've decided to be the entity that will provide the end-to-end service, and customers will measure us on that outcome at hopefully a lower or equal cost than, uh, let's say legacy, legacy player in the industry.

So that's just been inculcated in our DNA from day one, and we've seen the venture world kind of ebb and flow, whereas as soon as, as early as six months ago, uh, people were really excited about just selling agents to legacy freight brokers.

At least what we've seen is that that doesn't drive the same quality of outcomes because there's so much, uh, change management involved and the humans using the tools.

So we can go much deeper on it, but that's always been part of our DNA, and I think that now, uh, it's proving to be a very popular strategy in Silicon Valley, and I think it's the strategy that drives the best customer outcomes, particularly in freight.

That's the industry I know best, but I do see patterns in other industries as well, right? Which it sounds like you do too.

Yeah.

And then how do you think about pricing with that? Like tools- Total different pricing-

Yeah

... than trying to price that outcome, which is more around labor than, than just your tech budget.

So curious how you had that conversation internally, how are customers responding? Uh, maybe you don't have to talk about the revenue increase at Nu- Nuvo since, um, Nuvo AI, but, like, has that been a pretty positive impact?

Yeah.

So first of all, to answer your question on pricing model, the cool thing about being a full stack player is, uh, there shouldn't be too much craziness around how you price it, because at the end of the day, you're showing up to the customer and you're offering something comparable in price to the legacy provider.

And in theory, you're gonna drive better outcomes, and you're gonna make more money because your cost structure is significantly more lean, thanks to AI and automation, right? And it's getting better as these AI models get better, as, uh, you know, the cost to use AI in different workflows is going down.

So, uh, our three revenue streams, freight brokerage, customs brokerage, and managed transportation, which is kind of where Nuvo AI really fits in, they, they haven't changed.