FEDERICO VEGA

Federico Vega’s three-year-old startup matches independent truck drivers in Brazil with loads of cargo that need to be moved, lowering transportation costs for shippers while boosting income for truck drivers, who rarely travel empty—and processing more than $10 million monthly in payments along the way. This year, Cargox furthered its mission by opening its first VIP lounge for truckers, outside São Paulo, with a kitchen, TVS and Wi-fi, showers, laundry facilities, and gas. It’s open to all truckers, but Cargox drivers will get discounts. The company also started paying for any data charges related to the use of its app this year, making it free for truckers. In 2020, it will launch a mobile wallet, enabling drivers to receive payments immediately. Why did you think it was important to tackle trucking as an industry? There is a mismatch between freight and trucks, but there is also a massive lack of infrastructure to enable efficient logistics operations. That impacts the economy as a whole. How did you decide on the offerings beyond the app? We built a marketplace for truckers and shippers. Now we can start capturing the value that marketplace produces. In order to operate, these truckers need insurance, gas, mechanical services. And we are creating a financial infrastructure to make the life of the trucker easier, so they can go and buy a new truck, so they can have working capital. What other innovations are you planning? We are starting to [connect] the trucks in real time to our platform with different types of chips. We’ve already developed chips that we hide in the cargo to see where it goes in case it gets stolen. Those chips, in the future, are going to be able to give us more information, like what speed the cargo is traveling, how cold it is or how hot, and if it’s humid.