The Bolivian freight platform startup DeltaX raised $1M in a seed round. The round was led by Magma Partners, and other investors were Duro Ventures, 99 Startups, Cibersons and SC Angeles.
Some of the individual investors in the round were Nowports’ CEO Alfonso de los Ríos and Nuvocargo’s CEO Deepak Chhugani. DeltaX will invest the new funding to accelerate product development and begin operations in Bolivia’s neighboring countries.
The startup is accelerating the digital transformation of freight forwarding in the Andean region of Latin America. DeltaX does so by connecting shippers with transportation companies and independent truck drivers.
According to Luis Fernando Ortiz, founder and CEO of DeltaX, the region is in urgent need of a transformation:
“We estimate that the Andean region spends about $50B in over-the-road transportation, conducted by 1 million truck drivers in Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Chile, Bolivia, and Paraguay. The big problem is that logistics is still conducted in an old-fashioned, analog way. We built our technology to bring users to the cloud and allow them to digitally operate their shipments.”
Because a considerable amount of truckers in the Andean region work independently, there is a fragmentation in the system that creates many problems. DeltaX’s platform addresses several of them: it automates cargo reporting and tracking, it helps parties to communicate with each other, it displays shipment documentation and more.
Similar platforms in the market follow the same model, but DeltaX is the first to digitalize trucking in this specific region.
The startup is also planning to add a fintech element to the platform. Truck drivers in the region are in many cases underbanked because of their unstable income, and DeltaX wants to provide them with advances on upcoming revenue.
The company also wants to target the instability of their incomes through predictive algorithms to help them secure work in advance without paying to intermediaries.
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