Cargado expands freight marketplace into Canada, launches market rates tool

Cross-border freight platform Cargado is expanding its services into Canada, significantly growing market coverage following the success of its Mexico-U.S. offering. 

Cargado was founded by CEO Matt Silver and Chief Technology Officer Rylan Hawkins on Oct. 4, 2023, as a first-of-its-kind, invite-only load board for freight moving into and out of Mexico.

Brokers and carriers can now source and book cross-border capacity between Canada, Mexico and the U.S., all through a single platform, Silver said.

“We’ve seen a lot of really phenomenal growth in a lot of these brokers that have been building their Mexico business through our product,” he told FreightWaves in an interview “Now we’re excited to partner with all of them as we expand to Canada. Anybody can post any cross-border shipment within North America on Cargado. It could be Mexico to the U.S., Mexico to Canada, Canada to the U.S. or Mexico.

Since unveiling its load board in April 2024, Cargado has added more than 200 logistics customers and over 900 carriers to the platform. Clients such as brokers, 3PLs and freight forwarders post their cross-border freight to get bids on Cargado’s load board.

Silver and Hawkins created Cargado in response to increased nearshoring demand in Mexico. To date, Cargado has raised $22 million from investors including LGVP, Conversion Capital, Assembly Ventures and RyderVentures.

Cargado partners with eight of the top 10 freight brokers and more than half of the top 100, and many of them have already begun listing their Canadian freight, Silver said. 

Cargado’s Canada coverage spans lanes in British Columbia to Newfoundland and Labrador.

“Our clients have all been asking us to go to Canada. They’ve all been asking us from basically day one and said, ‘Hey, we don’t like our options today. We need help with Canada, too,’” Silver said. “We’ve gotten a lot of feedback that they really, really, really love our product. They love how it works. They love the fact that all the data is in the system.”

Related: Cargado launches first-ever load board for Mexico freight

In addition to expanding coverage into Canada, Cargado unveiled on Monday a market rates tool designed for cross-border freight. The tool aims to give brokers immediate access to current and historical lane-level pricing data for more accurate and confident quoting.

“Any of our customers that have signed up for this new product and anybody new coming in at this point, they’ll be able to get access to instant pricing for cross-border freight,” Silver said. “They can type in Chattanooga, and it spits out a low rate, a medium and a high — helping people price, whether it’s pricing contracted freight on a request for proposal or covering spot freight and trying to get a spot rate for something picking up in two days.”

The market rate tool allows customers to filter by trailer type, origin, destination and border crossing, cutting down the time and guesswork that typically surrounds pricing cross-border freight,” Hawkins said.

“Our expanding rate data reflects the latest from carriers that we’ve observed in the marketplace,” Hawkins said in a news release. “It is based on more than 35,000 historical bids and matches, across more than 200 brokers and is growing faster every day. Now, brokers can use that information to better price freight for their customers.”

Silver said the freight bidding data the company has collected over the past year can help reveal trend lines in the marketplace.

“The data is very powerful and accurate. For example, when Trump talks about tariffs, we could see price spikes and increases at different levels of confidence,” Silver said. “We give that data to the brokers so they can make the right decision in their pricing. But it’s really amazing to be able to see what’s going on externally in the news, and seeing the markets really reflect that accurately.”

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