Nowports

Alfonso (Poncho) and Maxi met in 2017 at a summer Bootcamp at Stanford University. During that Bootcamp, they both worked together in a competition, and as a result, they built a great relationship. Some time later, Maxi relocated to Kansas City to work as a freight forwarder for one of the largest forwarding groups in the world. There, Maxi was able to learn and understand the Logistics industry. Alfonso has been involved in the Forwarding industry since childhood, given that his family owned a traditional freight forwarding company in Mexico.Alfonso and Maxi realized that the Logistics industry in Latin America had been fine and was ripe for an innovative solution.At that moment, two geeky founders were born! Alfonso and Maxi started Nowports, building the first MVP within a few weeks. Once the MVP was built, they rapidly acquired the first customers, and a few weeks later, Y Combinator invited them to join the Winter 2019 batch.

Maxi applied to more than 30 accelerators worldwide during his time in Kansas City. Funnily enough, after getting invited for the in-person interview, a US accelerator confirmed Nowports was accepted, and Maxi and Poncho had the first tough decision in Nowports' trajectory: accept the first $50,000 and acceleration process or “go big or go home” by betting all to get accepted by Y Combinator.The decision was not easy, but it was clear Nowports’ founders were determined to get into the world's best accelerator: Y Combinator. The in-person interview was longer than standard, almost 20/25 minutes, to convince the partners to accept them into the batch.During the batch, we had the following objectives:1. Validate our product. During this step, we had to demonstrate that there was someone with a pain we could address with our product and that this person was willing to pay for our solution. Our added value is technology, which allows us to create automatic reports, quick quotes, and digitized documents and provide personalized attention and flexibility to adapt to almost any situation our clients face.2. Learn from the best. At this point, we had the opportunity to hear feedback from others who had already scaled their product successfully internationally. One memorable moment was meeting with the co-founders of Dropbox and Airbnb. We also were able to share ideas with many entrepreneurs from different countries.3. Carry out non-scalable activities. As the founder of a company, you have to solve issues in all areas. In the case of Nowports, that included selling during the day while coding at night to iterate on our product.Raise the first round of capital. During demo day, we had the opportunity to raise a seed series of funding of US$8.6M, which was one big round for two Latino first-time founders at that moment.