Even in a Bear Market, Nowports is Becoming LatAm's Flexport
A 22-year-old built LatAm's newest Unicorn during a bear market, mirroring Flexport's funding path.
A 16-year-old Mexican kid became friends with the ‘Godmother of Silicon Valley’ and went on to build LatAm’s newest Unicorn. The story of Poncho de los Rios, and Nowports, is incredible.
Growing up in a middle-class family in Monterrey, Alfonso de los Rios (aka Poncho) taught himself how to code by watching YouTube tutorials when he was a kid. As a technology lover, Poncho took a trip to Palo Alto in 2016. For inspiration, he was reading a book about Google’s founders. At a Starbucks, as he read through the company’s early beginnings in Esther Wojcicki’s garage, he noticed Esther herself sitting right across from him! He couldn’t pass up the chance to meet her, and they became instant friends.
Through their growing friendship, Poncho met the parents of some of the most outstanding entrepreneurs (including Maye Musk), connected with a top-notch network of founders, got a job at a startup, and enrolled in a few Stanford courses. That’s where he met his Nowports co-founder, Uruguayan Maximiliano Casal. Both later enrolled at the startup accelerator Y Combinator.
Since then, the pair have been building Nowports, a Latin American freight forwarding company that aims to digitalize logistics in the region. And it’s expanding fast, with recent office openings in Brazil, Panama, and Chile and more than 500 employees operating in 7 countries.
Last week, Softbank led a $150 million Series C funding round, which values the company at $1.1B and makes Poncho one of the youngest unicorn CEOs in the world (he’s just 22!). As our chart suggests, the company’s funding rounds have followed a similar path to Flexport, its US counterpart, and also backed by Softbank.
Logistics is one of the few hot tech industries during this bear market, as the world faces severe supply chain issues that desperately need to be solved. Flexport is one of the leading startups up to the task in the US, and Poncho openly admires its founder, Ryan Petersen. From the looks of investor sentiment, Poncho and Nowports are becoming exactly what they look up to.