Just like cargo.one, our popular podcast series is now multimodal. In Episode 16, cargo.one Founder & Co-CEO Moritz Claussen chats to our first ocean freight guest, uncovering top insights, formative experiences and prized advice. Subscribe today!
cargo.one:one returns with a passionate and highly experienced founder, technologist and ocean freight digital transformation expert. With over a decade of experience enhancing logistics workflows, Sebastian Cazajus is the Founder of Cargofive (recently acquired by cargo.one) and cargo.one’s own VP Ocean. Sebastian is the ideal guest to explore the vast potential for AI in ocean forwarding, and the key to success with agentic AI.
There were early signs that Sebastian would follow an ambitious entrepreneurial path – as a teenager, he tried many inventive business models, even selling meat to local butchers. He soon developed a flare for technology and building websites, which sparked his affinity with educating business owners about e-business.
Studying Business Administration provided Sebastian a strong financial knowledge and a first job in accounts. However, having caught the tech startup bug, he soon left the stability of finance to found a digital marketing agency that worked with entrepreneurs and SMEs to implement their first digital marketing campaigns.
He admits to being captivated by the transformative value that the online realm could deliver businesses: “I was like, I should really help companies and entrepreneurs to take opportunity from this world that is rising…that was one of the moments I have clicked with software.”
“The biggest barrier that we always had, and we still have, is this change in the mindset…technology is growing exponentially, but our minds are still kind of linear in a way and businesses are managed more in a linear way.”
Enjoy the full length episode, here:
Logistics always finds you
Like many guests of cargo.one:one, one brush with logistics is all it took for Sebastian to embark upon a life-long career: “I think it's more an industry that finds you rather than you find the industry…But then you cannot leave.” Having been introduced to one of the largest shippers in Argentina “moving hundreds of containers a month”, Sebastian was struck by just how throttled logistics procurement and management was by such slow, asynchronous email and phone communication.
In 2015 Sebastian founded the logistics management platform GenComex to provide a groundbreaking marketplace for logistics providers. He explains that while the platform was a meaningful step forward, users were hindered by the manual nature of inputting all the rates and charges – he concluded that the total solution would require dynamic rates pushed automatically to forwarders via APIs.
“In order to really change the industry to this vision of quoting and booking a container should be as simple as booking a flight or ordering a meal online – we needed to build this backend infrastructure. So that's why we started Cargofive.”
Sebastian set about the daunting task of financing his next chapter, Cargofive, and admits that the path was often rocky: “People don't realize what it takes to actually fund and found these companies…We ended up doing babysitting some days to continue with the business.” After some initial scepticism from ocean forwarders, Sebastian explains that the earliest rejections he received are today some of his biggest customers.
Cargofive grew to become very successful, and today brings to cargo.one connections to top 10 ocean carriers and is relied upon by some of the world’s largest forwarders, including Hellmann. Sebastian points to an acceleration in awareness and demand for digital quoting in ocean freight: “It was more about educating the industry and pushing. Now the top ocean liners, all of them have instant pricing. I think this has been an acceleration for sure.”
A completely different era
Sebastian and his team’s painstaking work to build out an API-drive, comprehensive ocean freight rate engine or “good data lake” has meant that the gaps of the technological past have today been conquered with a strong and reliable data capability that is ideal for powering AI: “This data layer is the most important thing in order to build AI automations…then pushing that into any AI tool that you want to build will become everyday easier.”
“AI is speeding up a lot of things…very soon it will be hard to out-compete a forwarder that is already running thousands of agents to the other that is relying on humans”
With a robust multimodal data foundation in place with cargo.one that can be shared equally by both agentic AI and human teams, freight forwarders can scale and enhance workflows across processes like rate procurement and management, quoting, booking, sales, and customer support, like never before. Sebastian shares: “There's a lot of great things going on. I think that at the end, we are in a completely different era.”
Sebastian’s passion for ocean freight, and determination to deliver digital change reflects the continued strength of his mission today, as well as an inspiring dose of fun and enjoyment: “It's a very complex industry. So it's a huge request and a huge demand that we always had. So I'm really, really excited!”.
Who does Sebastian nominate as an awesome guest for the series? Tune into Episode 16 now to find out! 🤩
cargo.one:one features many more exciting guests in the series. If you enjoyed this episode, stay tuned to our blog or subscribe using your favorite podcast platform including Spotify, Apple podcasts, Amazon Music, iHeartRadio, Castbox and more.
.jpg)
