How Cargamos CEO Ivan Ariza grew Cargamos to $18.1M revenue and 20 customers in 2024.

hey folks my guest today is ivan ariza he's building uh cargomost.com delivery stations for any brand he's an entrepreneur he's had an exit under his belt and again now focused on cargamos ivan you ready to take us to the top yeah okay um so what does cargo most do tell me about a customer who's paying you in cargamus we are trying to to bring any brand to the new cloud logistics so we empower these brands by creating a lot of uh creating a big network with uh micro fulfillment centers and enable all this location for for that guys and so are these real estate investors buying these micro like these facilities you're empowering them to help them run them as a micro like warehouse actually we are trying to to to re-propose that that don't use the space right now so we take and use the space and we re propose to converting this space turning into the micro fulfillment stations you're doing that personally as a company yeah our company it takes both we take an approaching infrastructure so we handle the infrastructure as well and the software in a business are you fine are you buying the real estate no we don't buy we we list in the real estate but actually we make an approach like we work with with their uh buildings with the landlord so our approaches and when we increase the package that leave the station we're going to pay to the landlord so we don't know pay any leasing or we don't buy the stations we only take the space and repropose it i understand tell me about price what do customers pay you on average to use your technology look in mexico you usually need to pay six dollars to deliver a package from mexico city to mexico city our proposal is to decrease the price but a big magnitude so right now our customers are paying more or less one one and a half dollars per delivery so the location more closer to the end customer help us to to deliver this mission but who's paying you these are companies paying big contracts right or is individual consumers paying a dollar today there are a high volume e-commerce brands that i they send us the package and we we held that big brands to deliver the package our first strategy is approach the bitcoin the big brands but yeah so that's what i'm asking what does a big brand pay you on average per month to use the technology and do these deliveries um look right now we are working with the number five three four five the biggest uh recommends right now in in mexico so right now we are delivering for that guys thousands of orders so they pay pay uh package that we deliver more or less one and a half one dollar so right now our figures are close to one million dollar per month got it so all in you're making a million dollars per month right now yeah close to to do that yeah i see can you break a million per month by the end of december yes we are trying to to break that number and we are hoping to do in december 1 1.2 million dollars per month and ivan if you're doing a million right now what were you doing exactly a year ago do you remember uh a year ago we were selling more or less 20 of our current revenue right now okay so call it two hundred thousand dollars per month yeah now is this your revenue or is this total volume and then you take a small cut of the million we take a good a good cause for i mean our sales it's one million dollars we take and we sold our the deliveries and all the operation that we are handling right now but we we take a now we take everything but it's not our profit it's it's just net revenue yeah so what i'm saying is if you're doing a million dollars per month that's your top line revenue do you have any big costs or is it you have sas margins of 83 84 85 percent no our margins right now are close to 80 uh 28 so that's our revenue right now what's your biggest what are your biggest costs there uh the labor um the stations and that's it that's the most um biggest one well sorry what's your gross rate i mean your labor and head count that would be bottom bottom line but when you look at gross revenue right so not net revenue but gross revenue is your gross revenue like 20 your gross margin 20 no yes my our gross margin is 28 yeah okay so you're processing a million dollars of volume of which your gross revenue your top bond revenue is something like 280 000 per month and then after you pay all your employees and stuff then you maybe have profits at the end ah okay we are not making profit right now we need to pay engineers and a lot of people but right now we are not making money sorry you're misunder let me try and rephrase this the million dollars you're doing per month is that volume of of like the the value of the packages flowing through your system or is that your revenue is that kargamos's revenue it's the cardigan's revenue money okay got it so when did you so you're at a 12 million run rate today but why are margins only 28 percent most software margins are 85 okay i'm not sure if i understand but the company what we are doing right now is we take package and we deliver package for each packet that we take on delivery we're gonna we ask for every package and um one two dollars per package all the package that we are delivering right now all the whole package right now and the all the the other companies in the company that are doing logistics we are asking to our company to our clients and they are paying us right now one million dollars if we break in our unit economic that number we're gonna see that our numbers it's more or less in the gross margin we are taking 28 percent and why is that so low though that's my question what most software companies their cost of goods sold is under 20 percent so their gross margin is 80 you're saying you have 80 percent cost basis on that million in revenue you're doing i'm trying to figure out what those extra costs are that most software companies don't have ah okay i got it we are not a completely software as a service company we are not just a software as a service we are we are paying uh the leasings we are paying uh the labor in the middle we are paying uh service partners so we are more um similar like maybe a store in the united in the u.s or maybe dhl so we are not completely a software as a service company we are both we are infrastructure and software as well i see so so last month how much total did you pay for your leases uh delicious uh is not the big company the big company is the labor uh in between i mean we pay any courier once they once uh he makes a deliver um we pay service partner as well with they as we pay a total bill that that has the the location and the labor as well for the autonomous how much did you pay couriers last month uh last month we paid um let me maybe sixty percent of that number so six six hundred thousand dollars yeah i see that's your biggest cost yeah that's my biggest cost got it okay that makes that makes more sense now um okay great uh let's so when did you launch the business when you write the first line of code uh november 19 uh 20 20 19 2019. and have you bootstrapped the business or did you decide to raise we will stop the business the three for at the at the beginning months and then we raise some money so until now we are raising close to 12 13 million dollars when was the last round three months ago and you raised 13 million one round uh yeah west side was seated round yeah so you raised 13 million dollars in your seed round and that was three months ago yeah did you do a pre-seed round or no no the procedure was the money that all the founders and close friends put in the company how many co-founders we have both and it's we are joining up fourth that is not this close we cannot disclose the name right now we are bringing a big name in logistics to the company but we are three three guys right now working really hard in this okay so the three of you the three of you got going in 2019 you did a pre-sea route pre-seed round back then of 1.3 million didn't you yeah okay and then after that in 2020 you did another part of the seed round for 2 million correct correct and then in total in 2021 you raised 2 million in early 2021 and 7 million just recently right right got it so what i what i'm trying to understand is what's so what makes this so expensive why do you need so much money to build this business look across latin america uh if you think about big locations for example fulfillment centers if you look at amazon for example you're going to find that a single location could cost even more than 100 billion 100 million dollars so right now in latin america we we don't have these locations in place we need to create some big locations some automate automatic automatization and put and a lot of it for creating the buildings the the the locations that we need to enable this infrastructure to ls miles so it's quite expensive in the infrastructure side in the software sites is quite similar to other companies but we need to raise money because we need to to implement that and that capability to the market that makes sense and the seven million that you just raised a couple months ago ivan what valuation did you raise that on the valuation uh we don't have valuation right now we are close to serious a...