Nuvo is a company that has built a social-like platform to facilitate the purchase of physical goods between businesses, raising a $34 million Series A from Sequoia Capital and Spark Capital.
The San Francisco-based startup raised $11 million in early 2022 from a private seed round led by the Founders Fund and Index Ventures.
Angel investor Gokul Rajaram, Instacart founder Max Mullen, Rippling COO Matt Macinis, Samsara founder Sanjit Biswas, John Bicket, and Flexport founder Ryan Petersen also wrote a check on Nuvo.
CEO and co-founder Sid Malladi launched Nuvo in 2021 with CTO Ramez Remsudeen, providing businesses with a way to create profiles that can be shared with their trading partners. Think of it as LinkedIn for B2B trading.
The business purchases of physical goods, such as wood and electronic components, and the credit contracts that support these purchases are a $11 trillion industry in the United States. But it’s an industry that is plagued by old ways of communicating, such as fax, phone calls, and email, says Remsudeen.
And with tariffs looming, the need for such a platform has never been greater than ever.
“For tariffs and other reasons, volatility causes changes in the trade partnership of all companies that need to accommodate changes in price, risk, or other parameters,” Malladi, former product manager at Yelp, told TechCrunch. “If you rely on a pen and paper process, this doesn’t happen smoothly.”
Nuvo wants to help businesses connect with their trading partners more quickly and gain faster access to information such as creditworthiness, bank data, and partner history. By helping businesses connect and validate one another, Nuvo claims that it could also reduce instances with less fraud, loss, delays, and management overhead.
So, how does it work? Sellers invite buyers to join the platform. These buyers can connect with additional sellers. Users create business identity profiles, and the platform validates information in real time. Users can also obtain customer references, credit reports, FICO scores and license validations on the NUVO customer dashboard. Additionally, customers will gain the potential to connect with new suppliers, ensure better credit terms and streamline their own purchasing processes, says Sequoia partner Bryan Schreier.
“The potential for network effects reminds us that Sequoia is fortunate to work with partners. “When new customers join Nuvo, they will take buyers and sellers and create a data platform that will continue to improve along the way. By bringing B2BCommerce online, Nuvo will enable businesses to grow with confidence and security.”
Malladi says there are other companies trying to do something similar, including Highradius.
“The key difference is that Nuvo is not a single-player SaaS tool. It’s a network,” says Remsudeen. “When it comes to managing social relationships, it’s like comparing contact apps to Facebook.”
By the end of the second quarter, Nuvo, which currently has 42 employees, will acquire around 50,000 companies in its trade network, including Great Dane, Southern Glazer Wine & Spirits and Fender. We currently charge an annual subscription fee.
Nuvo’s core markets are alcohol and drinks, building materials, chemicals, distribution, food services and manufacturing. It aims to expand to new verticals, not just features such as payments and AI. It is also looking to expand internationally, focusing on markets such as Mexico, Latin America, Europe and the Asia-Pacific region.