Why we invested in Agent Astra, creating the AI workforce for import and export companies

This is part of our "why we invested in" series of posts – a glimpse into what we look for when writing the first check for top emerging founders across Latin America. As investors and journey partners, we hope this series will inform and inspire other early startup creators in the region.

There’s one implication of the AI breakthroughs that we have been studying for the last few quarters – and seeing across some special LatAm startups.

If once software ate the world, now artificial intelligence is naturally eating software. The combination of SaaS and AI agents will then slowly eat the labor market. These companies' total addressable markets are no longer software budgets; they’re payroll and services themselves. As some call it: “Service as Software”.

Agent Astra is one of these special startups, transforming the import/export market (a vertical we’ve also been tracking for a while) through AI agents. Here, we'll dive deep into how exactly they're doing it and what's to come.

(Psst, spoiler: a killer thesis led to a killer solution.)

TL;DR: investment overview

🚢 The market: In the US only, there are around 100k freight forwarders and brokers, 220k importers, and 270k exporters (with 80k companies doing both imports and exports). Go global and you’ll see exports and imports involve millions of companies, of all sizes and shapes. But no matter the country, importers and exporters are almost always subject to bureaucracy: managing a single shipment process can take employees two hours to complete.

Through our early investment in another Latitud portfolio company, Finkargo, we’ve seen how players like freight forwarders play a crucial role of being “door-men” of these massive global supply chains — and massive volumes of goods traded. Finkargo empowers those players with credit and financial products embedded in their software platform, while Agent Astra is helping them with increasing their productivity and throughput, through its AI agents.

🤖 The startup: Agent Astra develops the AI workforce that supports import/export companies. Its first agent is Hermes, an AI employee who automates 94% of back-office tasks. What took two hours now takes five minutes – not only freeing up valuable employee resources but also reducing costly errors.

💰 The round: Latitud was one of the first investors in Agent Astra’s pre-seed round. What stood out to us the most was Agent Astra’s 1. founding team, 2. the thesis, and 3. its present and latent traction.

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The Founding Team

Agent Astra has a seasoned core team, with previous experience in the import/export market, scaling tech businesses, and managing complex teams.

Co-founder and CEO Pierre-Antoine Rohr-Lacoste was the former Head of Sales at the identity verification startup MetaMap, acquired by Incode. He scaled sales up to $18M ARR in 24 months, leading a team of 150 people across four continents. Prior to that, Pierre worked in consulting for seven years, focused on import/export clients.

Agent Astra’s CTO Artur Zhdanov brings years of experience in artificial intelligence. He was previously the Head of Platform at Arrival, a UK-based self-driving car company valued at over $1B. And Senior Engineer Aleksei Rasskazov had that same role at both MetaMap and Arrival, with extensive experience leading technical teams.

Finally, Executive Board Member Amaury Soviche was previously a co-founder of MetaMap, and now is leading Ogment.ai.

Supported by advisors from companies like Flexport, Nubank, and Uber, we believe this team is uniquely positioned to drive innovation and growth in the import/export market.

The Thesis

Moving goods across borders has some things in common with managing an orchestra 🎻:

First, both need precise coordination between multiple parties to avoid disaster. For Agent Astra, these are exporters, freight forwarders, importers, customs – you name it.

Second, both need to execute multiple steps to perfection to be truly successful. Making a single shipment arrive can involve dozens of documents, cross-checks, and data entry into systems. It’s an intensive, error-prone labor.

The thing is… all these simple, repetitive, high-volume tasks are done manually. That means there’s an employee out there who sees two hours of their life taken away at each shipment process they manage. ⚰️🪦

If you’re as excited about artificial intelligence as we are, you probably see where this is going: it’s the perfect scenario for artificial intelligence to jump in.

Agent Astra’s first product is Hermes, an AI employee that automates 94% of back-office tasks. This Back-Office Manager automates document management, data entry, and workflow triggers across systems in five minutes per shipment.

While each human employee could previously handle 100 operations per month max, AI now makes headcount no longer a barrier to growth. By keeping a human in the loop only when strictly necessary, the startup also achieves close to 100% accuracy in data consistency, far exceeding traditional manual work. This is important because errors are costly in this industry, possibly leading to cargo delays, storage fees, or even shipment rejections at delivery.

We believe Agent Astra’s thesis is a prime example of how the combination of SaaS and AI is progressively attacking not only the software but also the payroll/services market to expand its TAM.

For import/export companies, Agent Astra provides a more effective solution in terms of both results (less time, fewer mistakes) and costs. In the US, the startup’s annual rate of $12k per AI agent is significantly lower than the average $55k salary for an entry-level back-office employee.

Present and Latent Traction

Hermes is only the first product in Agent Astra’s roadmap, already closing a robust pipeline of customers.

In the shorter term, the startup is refining its artificial intelligence and integrations. In the longer term, Agent Astra will provide a full suite of AI Employees for the import/export industry, launching AI employees for processes such as selling, quoting, and invoicing. Both will set the foundation for sustained growth of Agent Astra’s pipeline, looking at the TAM of the import/export payroll space.

Future: Why We’re Excited

AI Agents are evolving from support roles to autonomous decision-makers, and we expect this movement to happen even faster when we look at simple, repetitive, high-volume tasks. Import/export workflows are a prime example, and ripe for AI transformation.

Looking ahead, we and Agent Astra envision international trade companies powered primarily by AI Agents that interact seamlessly across departments. Human employees will be free to tackle bigger, more complex challenges. Both will work together to build a future where international supply chains can be cheaper, faster, and more resilient against current financial and operational pressures.

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A quick word about Latitud

Latitud is the first-check partner for LatAm founders building good sh*t.

It all starts with the Latitud Fellowship, our program for founders who wanna kick off something big for LatAm or the US with the support from Latitud's network. Entrepreneurs in ideation bring in the vision and commitment; we bring not only initial capital but a selected community of peers, mentors, and potential next investors.

As the leading pre-seed venture capital firm in Latin America, we become partners to top entrepreneurs inside and outside that Fellowship so they get even closer connections, guidance, and intros so they go from 0 to 1.

Latitud is led by Tomas Roggio and Brian Requarth. Through Fund I and II, we've already invested in 70+ amazing startups led by amazing founders (check them out).

Our bet in Agent Astra is another proof of our commitment to backing early-stage startups transforming industries and bringing positive impact to LatAm.

Sounds like you? Then we'd love to have a chat! Pitch your startup here.