The border was broken. He decided to wire it up.
Deepak Chhugani runs Nuvocargo, a company most consumers will never notice and most supply chains cannot do without. It is an AI-powered platform for moving truckload freight across the border between the United States and Mexico, and it folds jobs that used to live in separate offices - trucking, customs brokerage, cargo insurance, financing - onto a single screen. The pitch is simple. The border between the two countries carries hundreds of billions of dollars of goods a year, and much of the paperwork behind it still moves by phone call, email and fax. Chhugani wants that work to run like software.
Today Nuvocargo is dually based in New York City and Mexico City, gives shippers access to a network of more than 300,000 carriers, and describes itself as an AI partner for North American truckload freight, with a dozen or more AI agents automating the repetitive touchpoints of a shipment. The company has raised over $75 million from investors that include Y Combinator, Tiger Global, QED and NFX. In 2023 Chhugani landed on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list for enterprise technology in North America.
The origin is less Silicon Valley than it is a trade route. Chhugani was born in Kenya to Indian parents and grew up in Ecuador, where his father had settled after moving from India and spent roughly three decades building a small international logistics business - helping Ecuadorian companies handle imports and exports between Asia and Latin America. Freight, in other words, was the family trade long before it was a startup idea. He went to university in the United States, studying business at Bentley University, and then went to Wall Street.
At Bank of America Merrill Lynch he worked on the Latin America mergers-and-acquisitions team, involved in more than $3 billion in deals. Sitting between New York and Mexico, he kept noticing the same thing: enormous volumes of trade flowing between the US and Mexico, and surprisingly little technology underneath it. Mexico is one of the largest trading partners of the United States, and the logistics of getting a truck from a factory in one country to a warehouse in the other remained stubbornly manual. That gap became Nuvocargo.
He founded the company in March 2019. His profile was unusual for the venture world - a solo, non-technical founder, and, by his account, the first Ecuadorian native funded by Y Combinator in that mold, at 24. He has spoken candidly in podcasts about the parts that came before the company worked: the pivots, the cold outreach, the slow work of earning trust from carriers and shippers who had been burned by promises before. His advice tends to circle back to the same blunt idea - that attention has to be earned, not assumed.
There is a mission wrapped around the mechanics. Chhugani talks openly about representation, arguing that there should be more Latino leaders in technology because visible role models help fund the next wave of founders in overlooked sectors and regions. Nuvocargo, sitting at the seam of US and Latin American trade and staffed across both countries, is his version of putting that belief into practice. He is an Endeavor Entrepreneur and has been named among the top LatinX tech leaders.
The timing has been kind to the thesis. As companies rethink long, fragile supply chains and move manufacturing closer to the United States - the shift usually filed under "nearshoring" - Mexico has become a bigger and bigger part of the picture. Someone has to move all that freight, and clear it, and insure it, and finance it. Chhugani built the company for exactly that moment, and now leans on AI agents to automate the grunt work so his team can handle the exceptions that still need a human. For a founder whose life reads like a map of trade - Kenya, India, Ecuador, New York, Mexico City - it is a fitting thing to be building.