trade-finance
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Pelican.ai and the expensive art of the false alarm
A payment can travel the world and still get stuck on a name. Pelican.ai has spent three decades teaching banking software to untangle the instructions, checks and false alarms that hold money up.
Preferred Bank makes a business of staying lean
The Los Angeles lender pairs personal service with tight operating costs. Its history shows both the appeal of that approach and the price of reaching beyond it.
ICSFS builds the bank behind the balance
From Islamic finance contracts to a five-month core replacement in South Sudan, ICS Financial Systems sells the machinery that makes banking work. Its latest deployments show the appeal - and the demands - of buying a whole banking system.
Pole Star Global: From telephone boxes to the dark fleet
A delayed shipment of British telephone boxes helped inspire a ship-tracking business. Today, Pole Star Global sells the intelligence behind decisions to charter vessels, finance cargo and investigate ships with something to hide.
How Windward Taught Ships to Tell on Themselves - and Built a £216 Million Maritime Intelligence Business
Two former naval officers started by chasing illegal fishing and discovered the buyers were scarce. They kept the data engine, changed the customer, and turned ships that go dark, spoof locations or swap identities into a legible business signal.
The Freight Forwarder That Wants to Make Shipping Feel Boring
Global trade still runs on phone calls, spreadsheets and anxious follow-ups. Cogoport is packaging the messy middle - rates, bookings, customs, tracking, insurance and credit - into one operating layer for smaller businesses.
The Free Ledger That Became a Wholesale Operating System
CrediBook won merchants with a free digital ledger. Then it followed the entries upstream - into stock, wholesale orders, delivery and the seven-day credit that keeps a neighborhood shop moving.
Ninety Percent of the Economy, Ten Percent of the Credit
SMEs are most of the UAE economy and a fraction of its lending. CredibleX embeds working capital where business already happens - and turned Mubadala into a lead investor with a $15 million Series A.
The Quiet Software Layer Rewiring How Banks Move Money
Finzly does not ask a bank to rip out its core. It slips in beside it, gathers a thicket of payment rails into one system, and turns years-long modernization into a sequence of smaller, safer moves.
The $80 Billion Bank That Started in a Chinatown Storefront
East West Bank spent five decades turning a Chinatown savings and loan into the financial bridge between the United States and Asia. Today it holds about $80 billion in assets - and still answers the phone in the language you grew up speaking.
Baskit
We simplify supply chain challenges with tools that help brands grow and scale in Indonesia.
Waza
Waza is a Y Combinator-backed (W23) B2B payments and liquidity platform that helps businesses in emerging markets - starting with Nigeria and Ghana - pay global suppliers, hold multi-currency balances, and access USD without the friction of traditional correspondent banking. Founded in 2023 by fintech veterans Maxwell Obi and Emmanuel Igbodudu, the company processes hundreds of millions of dollars in annual payment volume and in 2025 launched Lync, a multi-currency banking product positioned as an alternative to Mercury for African startups.
Incomlend
Incomlend is a Singapore-based global invoice financing marketplace that connects SMEs, exporters and importers with institutional investors, letting businesses convert unpaid trade invoices into cash - often within 48 hours and for up to 90% of invoice value - without traditional collateral. Founded in 2016 by Morgan Terigi and Dimitri Kouchnirenko, the platform lets investors 'cherry-pick' individual cross-border receivables, and has financed more than USD 1 billion in trades across 50+ countries and 20+ industries.
MonetaGo
MonetaGo builds digital public infrastructure for trade and finance, best known for its Secure Financing system that detects duplicate financing fraud without exposing sensitive data. By turning trade documents into cryptographic digital fingerprints and checking them against a global registry inside a confidential computing environment, MonetaGo lets banks, TReDS exchanges and central banks verify that an invoice or bill of lading has not already been financed elsewhere - preserving privacy while closing a major gap in trade finance risk.
Open Mineral
Open Mineral is a Swiss-based, AI-driven metals trading firm and digital marketplace that connects miners, smelters, and traders to buy and sell physical metal raw materials - such as copper, zinc, lead, gold and silver concentrates - directly and transparently. Founded in 2017 by former Glencore traders, the company pairs a physical trading desk with proprietary data and pricing algorithms to digitize a historically opaque, relationship-driven industry, and has onboarded hundreds of mining and metals companies across dozens of countries.
Mundi
Mundi is a digital trade-finance platform that gives small and mid-sized Mexican exporters and importers fast access to working capital. Instead of waiting 30 to 90 days to be paid, businesses use Mundi to advance invoices, finance purchase orders, draw on revolving credit lines, and manage payments, FX and cargo insurance through a single online platform. Founded in 2020 and backed by Union Square Ventures, Mundi has financed more than $1 billion in cross-border trade to over 60 countries.
Nuvocargo
Nuvocargo is a digital-first freight forwarder and licensed U.S. customs broker built to simplify the $40B+ over-the-road freight market between the United States and Mexico. Through a single platform, it combines trucking, customs clearance, cargo insurance, carrier payments and trade finance, and is increasingly layering AI automation across the load lifecycle. Founded in 2019 by Deepak Chhugani, the New York- and Mexico City-based company has raised over $74M and rode the nearshoring wave to serve roughly 500 shippers including Kimberly-Clark, Nestle and Grupo Bimbo.
Martin Pustilnick
Martin Pustilnick is the co-founder and CEO of Mundi, a New York-based fintech platform that fronts working capital to small and mid-sized Mexican exporters so they don't have to wait 30, 60, or 90 days to get paid by cross-border buyers. An Argentine economist and Stanford MBA who worked at BCG, OLX, PayJoy, EXOR, and FJ Labs before starting Mundi in 2020, he has raised roughly $138M in equity and debt, including a $16M Series A led by Union Square Ventures and a $100M warehouse facility from Silicon Valley Bank.
Blooms
Blooms is an AI-driven trade finance platform that gives Latin American fresh-produce exporters faster access to working capital, cross-border factoring, and multi-currency payments as they ship fruits and vegetables into the US and Canada. Founded by fintech veteran Francisco Mere, the company purchases exporters' US receivables, absorbs the credit risk stateside, and advances up to 80% of an invoice within 24 hours - smoothing the cash-flow gap that has long strangled growers who sell perishable goods across borders. It raised a $2.6M seed round in May 2025 led by agritech VC SP Ventures.
Francisco Mere
Francisco Meré is the founder and CEO of Blooms, a financial-technology company that gives Latin American fruit and vegetable exporters fast working capital, cross-border factoring, and multi-currency payments so their produce can reach North American shelves. A lawyer-turned-banker-turned-builder, he previously co-founded Bankaool, Mexico's first fully digital bank, ran the agricultural development bank FIRA, and chaired Mexico's fintech association. With Blooms he is chasing a multibillion-dollar financing gap that keeps growers cash-poor even as demand for fresh produce booms.