Founders Interviews: Sebastian Cazajus of Cargofive
Our Founders Interview this month is with Cargofive’s Co-founder and CEO, Sebastian Cazajus.
Cargofive is a logistics solution that empowers freight forwarders to join the industry’s digital evolution. Cargofive’s system was specially designed for forwarders to help them digitize and optimize their pricing process. This allows them to reduce efforts and costs while offering an experience that is more adapted to their customers’ needs.
First, can you tell us about your professional background and the path that led you to Cargofive?
I’m originally from Argentina, from Buenos Aires. I started my career there. At the beginning of my career, I was involved in the logistics industry after I finished my graduation in Business Administration. The goal for me was to find the best way to move containers from from point A to point B, and honestly that project was a bit of a weird experience because everything was super manual. Searching for prices, schedules to move the containers, tons of emails, excel files, PDFs. It was like working in the 90s, and I thought where is the technology in this industry? Where are the Booking.com or the Skyscanners in this industry? But I left the industry for a few years. I always had this passion for technology, to build products, to bring value and impact, so I decided to start my own ventures. I left the corporate world and I built a software factory and a digital marketing agency, I built some e-commerce brands. Then a few years later, thanks to a colleague, I was involved again in the logistics industry. We started discussing about the same challenge that I faced in this earlier project that I told you about, and we realized why don’t we build tech for this industry? We had this vision that finding a price to move a container should be as simple as booking a flight or ordering a meal on Uber Eats. So, we decided to start with this vision and are now enjoying the challenge since 2019. It was combination of passion for tech and being involved in this problem that I’d faced earlier.
How is your product different from others in the market? What makes it unique?
At the end of the day everything is about people, right? I’d say our biggest differentiation in addition to our vision is the love we have for the tech and the industry knowledge that we have, because most of the team have themselves been involved in the logistics industry. In terms of product itself I would divide it into two things. One is that most of the solutions that are in the market, the integration of data to find the rates and the schedules is super manual. They use people to find the data in one place and to input it into the system. Our core offering is that we use machine learning and automations to gather this data in real time. It’s way more cost efficient and the experience for the user is way better because they don’t have to wait, they don’t have to pay more because there is no people involved in the process, most of the processes done by a computer. That’s one of the biggest competitive advantages that we have. And then, an important value we have is that we are super user and customer-centric. The industry super complex and most of the solutions out there in terms of product tend to be just building features every day. They keep adding features every day instead of thinking about where the user takes value from these features, We focus more on the value and how we are saving time for our user rather than the amount of functionalities that we add to the product.
What has been the most crucial moment in the history of Cargofive so far?
To be honest the most crucial was the loss of one of our co-founders Juan Francisco Garabato. He was an amazing guy, super visionary. He had this incredible willingness to help other people, and he was crazy about building tech and building products. A super inspirational person. His passing was a super hard. As a startup founder you need to be super resilient, right? But with this was another level both personally and professionally for the entire team. It was a huge shift in the sense that in order to go through this adversity we had to become stronger as a team, connect more personally and professionally. We had a purpose and a vision as a company of transforming the container shipping industry, but at least for the people that were there and knew him, this built another level of purpose. There are a lot of different moments, but I think this one was the most crucial.
If you could go back in time, is there anything you’d do differently?
I believe that I am who I am right now because of all the challenges that I’ve had to go through and all these steps that I have to go through. So I can’t really say that I would change something it was all part of the journey. The only thing that I can say is maybe to embrace these challenges faster, because end I remember for example it was a challenge for me to even establish a company at the beginning. And then I established companies in 9 countries already. But I remember myself establishing the first company when I moved to Chile when I was like 25 and it was kind of a challenge, building the bylaws, etc. Now I think back and I realize it took me two weeks to take a decision. It’s just establishing a company, its the most simple thing. However, in retrospect, you need to go through that, and its the same thing with hiring people, firing people, churning the first customer. Like the first customer that we churned I was almost crying! But now I see that if you want to build a big company churn is a KPI that you need to measure, its part of the business. Just go through the challenge and don’t wait so much before you act.
How does Cargofive plan on making a sizeable impact with regards to decarbonization / sustainability?
So first paint a picture of the size of the industry. I always like to say that 90% of everything that we consume every day is transported in containers. This is the backbone of global trade and global economy, so it’s huge. 200 billion dollars are spent every year to transport all these goods, and then almost 3% of all the carbon emissions globally are generated just by the container shipping industry. This means that there is a big opportunity to help companies understand what are the different eco-friendly solutions that they have to ship their products, and that is one of our goals. Now, currently it is very difficult to connect all these dots. You cannot compare price and sustainability KPIs because they are simply not available right now. So we are working a lot on that process, the goal is to keep adding more visibility to every trade and once you go and search a transport, you access the rate and you access the schedules, but you can also decide based on the carbon emissions that each of the shipments could have. So in a way, we are bringing more awareness and empowering the shippers and freight forwarders to find more sustainable or an friendly solutions.
What can we expect from Cargofive now that you have raised an extended €2.5 million round of funding?
The key word here is expansion. We have been growing really fast in Europe and we are on way to continue expanding our solution. We have been very strong in the South, we have been closing customers in the north and also in the US, so yeah, consolidating more markets. The traction is good and the customer feedback is good. Now it’s time to continue expansion as I mentioned mainly in Europe and the US. On the other side, in product development, we continue investing in machine learning and AI mainly to enhance and to improve the productivity of our customers. If you think about it, the process of moving the containers, there are hundreds of touch points required to ensure that the container moves from point A to point B, and with this technology that we are building our goal is to reduce those touch points. Like if you have 100, let’s do it in 10, and lets eliminate the 90% of touch points that can be solved with technology.
What’s your grand vision for Cargofive?
Its building the infrastructure that simplifies global trade. As I mentioned, we want to make moving a container as easy as it is to buy a flight ticket.
