Building the future of freight collaboration
How we’re rethinking how brokers and carriers connect on Mexico and Canada freight.
We started planning and designing Cargado two years ago this week. Rylan and I had been talking for weeks about how broken cross-border freight still was — the tools, the workflows, the communication. Before long, Steven, Jonathan, and Teagan joined as our founding engineers, and together we began refining designs in Figma — making adjustments on the fly and in between meetings as we shaped what a truly modern freight platform could look like.
Before we wrote a single line of code, we took a trip to Laredo. We wanted to see the real thing — the brokers, the carriers, the border crossings, the chaos. Between conversations we stopped at Palenque Grill and later República, reviewing designs and feedback in real time. Those early iterations became the foundation of what Cargado is today.
The Marketplace: Our Starting Line
We went live on a Thursday in early April 2024. The product was rough — barely out of alpha. We had a few brokers (three, to be exact) and about 200 carriers. That first day, a few loads got posted… but there were no carrier notifications yet, so nobody was bidding.
I spent that weekend with a knot in my stomach — refreshing dashboards, double-checking code, calling carrier friends to plead with them to log in. By Monday, a few of them had, and that’s when things started to move. Loads were getting posted, carriers were bidding, brokers were matching. We started calling it the trifecta — postings, bids, and matches happening every hour.
Today, we see 300 to 500 carrier bids every single day. That foundation — brokers posting and carriers submitting bids — became more than a workflow. It became a data engine.
From Matching Freight to Measuring the Market
Those bids gave us something powerful: real-time visibility into what cross-border freight actually costs.
That’s how Market Rates was born. It’s built entirely on live carrier bids — not guesses, not surveys, not stale quarterly averages.
Now, brokers and carriers use Market Rates across multiple channels:
Directly inside the Cargado UI
Through an Excel Add-In
Or via API, connected to their TMS or internal pricing tools
They use it to set max-pay rules inside their TMS, benchmark current spend, spot-price freight intelligently, and even run entire RFPs.
Market Rates turned raw data into structured intelligence. But the truth is, information alone doesn’t move freight. People do — and the way they communicate is still broken.
Geographic Expansion Strategy
Over the past year, we’ve expanded into two new markets that we’re investing in deeply: Canada and domestic Mexico.
Both bring unique complexity and opportunity.
In Canada, we’re supporting bilingual communication, longer hauls, and trade flows that mirror what we’ve already built for Mexico ↔ U.S. freight.
In Mexico, we’re helping brokers and carriers collaborate on domestic freight, using the same verified network and data-driven foundation that powers our cross-border business.
Our strategy is simple: build a platform that creates a better experience for the logistics of North American trade — one that connects brokers and carriers across Mexico and Canada through modern tools, verified relationships, and structured communication.
And as part of that, we’re already preparing to support domestic Canada freight and partial loads, further strengthening the collaboration layer that makes Cargado so different.
The Chaos Between the Bids
If you’ve worked in freight, you already know what I mean.
The industry is buried under:
Endless emails that go nowhere
WhatsApp threads with no context
Group texts missing half the participants
Phone calls that disappear into memory
Spreadsheets trying to make sense of it all
It’s exhausting. It’s also where fraud hides and accountability dies.
Cross-border freight adds another layer: language barriers, time zones, regulatory differences. Everyone’s improvising through disconnected tools that were never meant for freight.
That’s why we built Chat — not as another feature, but as the third pillar of the Cargado platform.
Introducing Chat
Chat connects everything we’ve built so far — and fixes the communication gap that’s plagued this industry for decades.
It’s not a generic messenger. It’s freight-first collaboration.
Verified Profiles
Every user in Chat has a verified identity: company, role, language, and location. No spoofing, no fake carriers, no guessing. It makes every interaction more human — you can actually see who you’re working with.
Real-Time Translation
Messages translate instantly between English, Spanish, and French, so dispatchers and brokers between Monterrey, Chicago, and Montreal can talk naturally without losing time or nuance.
Organized by Freight
Each posting, bid, or match automatically spins up its own thread. You can search by lane, load, or partner. Every message ties back to real freight.
AI-Aware Context
When someone drops a number, Chat recognizes it as a bid or counter and helps you act on it. The platform is being built by freight experts with freight knowledge deeply ingrained in every corner and throughout the conversation.
Personalized Connection
Profiles bring familiarity. You can tag teammates, reconnect with trusted carriers, and see faces instead of phone numbers. It’s the digital version of shaking hands across borders.
Cargado Chat already connects brokers to more than 1,500 carriers representing over 200,000 trucks and 450,000 trailers.
Want to see what Chat looks like? Check it out here:
What People Are Saying
When we started rolling Chat out to customers, the response was immediate — and loud.
“WhatsApp and email are chaos. Chat keeps everything organized and searchable.”
“It’s the best improvement from Cargado — hands down.”
“We were negotiating rates in WhatsApp. Now we do it in Chat. It’s faster, clearer, and actually trackable.”
That’s all we needed to hear.
What We Actually Believe
Most freight tech has tried to remove people from the process — automating every click, every call, every decision.
That’s never been our philosophy.
People should be building or managing relationships and solving problems — not entering data or haggling over rates or sending out blast emails or texts.
Automation is valuable, but it should exist to support the human part of freight, not erase it.
That’s what Chat does: it connects verified people, attaches structured data, and turns communication into something you can trust, reference, and build on.
A Collaboration Platform — Not a Load Board
We started with a marketplace to connect brokers and carriers. We took the data from that activity and built a pricing product to help brokers win more freight, which feeds the marketplace flywheel. Now we’re launching Chat to make it a more human experience.
Together, they form the foundation of a true collaboration platform for freight.
Marketplace connects brokers and carriers.
Market Rates provides shared visibility into real-time price.
Chat gives them a place to communicate and act.
It’s not automation for automation’s sake. It’s about connecting the people who move freight — and doing it in a way that’s traceable, multilingual, and secure.
Where We’re Headed
We’re actively integrating with several major TMS providers to make Cargado data and workflows feel native inside the systems brokers already live in.
That means more freight flowing through the Marketplace, more dynamic data powering Market Rates, and a smoother experience across the board.
And as Chat expands, it’s going to open new ways for teams to collaborate — not just across borders, but across entire organizations.
We want to eliminate the endless spreadsheets that dominate this industry and replace them with structured, connected communication.
I won’t spoil what’s next, but it’s all in service of the same goal — make collaboration in freight simple, secure, and data-driven.
Looking Back — and Ahead
That week in Laredo — balancing meetings, Palenque Grill fajitas, and late-night República debriefs — we had no idea how far this would go.
Two years later, we’ve built a platform that’s powering hundreds of brokers and carriers across North America.
The trifecta we celebrated in 2024 is now happening thousands of times per day.
And this is still just the start.
Freight will always come down to people — relationships, trust, communication.
But those things deserve better infrastructure.
That’s what we’re building: a connected, collaborative network where communication isn’t chaos and data doesn’t live in silos.
Marketplace. Market Rates. Chat.
Three products — one mission.
To build the future of freight collaboration.
Reach out to get access to Cargado Chat — it’s rolling out gradually to our customers across Mexico, the U.S., and Canada. You can get in line for early access at cargado.com.
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