Diego Bertezzolo

He had never worked in logistics. His background was in heavy machinery sales, retail and foreign trade, and that distance eventually became his greatest asset. Diego Bertezzolo founded Avancargo with two partners he met while completing a postgraduate program and turned an academic project into a platform that today manages a network of more than 120,000 verified trucks and operates in three countries.

An industry operating as it did fifty years ago

The diagnosis that gave rise to Avancargo is as simple as it is uncomfortable. Argentina has around 700,000 trucks spread across some 250,000 small and medium-sized transport companies, with fleets averaging two or three vehicles. Between 35 and 40 percent of capacity travels empty because coordinating such a fragmented market is virtually impossible with phone calls and spreadsheets. Bertezzolo once summed it up by saying that carriers, the link that holds the entire service together, are still largely improvising their way through the business.

The size of the problem explains the opportunity: around 15 billion dollars in annual revenue, roughly 50,000 trips every day and logistics costs that can account for as much as 40 percent of the production cost of a product.

From Volvo to a classroom at San Andrés

Before entering the industry, Bertezzolo ran commercial operations for Volvo CE in Argentina and Uruguay. His career had always been on the commercial side, with earlier experience in retail and foreign trade. Logistics was unfamiliar territory, and he says it plainly: when he started, he knew nothing about the sector.

He now sees that initial ignorance as an advantage. His argument is that transforming an industry is often easier from the outside because people who have spent their careers within it find it difficult to escape the mental framework the industry itself imposes.

The project began while he was completing a postgraduate program at Universidad de San Andrés, where he met the partners with whom he would eventually found the company. One came from traditional logistics operations and the other from corporate strategy. The academic requirement to validate the idea acted as a filter: by the time they finished the project, they were convinced the opportunity was real.

At the end of 2017, they left their jobs, went looking for venture capital and built a minimum viable product.

The chicken-and-egg problem

Building a two-sided marketplace comes with a familiar problem: having trucks without loads is of little use, and so is having loads without trucks. Avancargo solved it in its early stage by partnering with Cresud, part of the IRSA Group, which guaranteed a minimum number of trips for the first carriers that joined the platform. From that base, they began building the rest.

The other obstacle was macroeconomic. The first investment round was almost closed in February 2018 when the March devaluation blew it apart. They rebuilt the round in early 2019, only for another currency crisis halfway through the year to destroy the numbers again.

Bertezzolo describes entrepreneurship in Argentina as a roller coaster, with the added difficulty that the project was born and grew during a recession, as freight volumes fell and companies around them went out of business.

What the platform actually solved

The most useful lesson came from operating the business. Finding a truck or a load was not the difficult part. What caused trips to be lost was document validation: some clients took 48 hours to approve paperwork, enough time for the truck to accept another load or return empty.

From that point on, Avancargo stopped being merely a place to request a truck and became a management and compliance platform. Today, a shipper can validate a vehicle simply by entering its license plate, upload transportation requirements online, view rates, track the trip and close it with all documentation digitized.

For carriers, the platform sorts opportunities by proximity so that they do not accept a load that requires hundreds of kilometers of empty travel.

The result Bertezzolo is pursuing is not lower freight rates, something he says is often misunderstood, but transportation that moves less and moves better. The carrier wins, the shipper wins and the end customer wins.

The numbers behind the takeoff

The restructuring of the sector after the pandemic gave the company an unusual boost. Between 2020 and 2022, revenue increased almost 72-fold. In 2022 alone, the workforce grew from 13 to 30 people, unique carriers increased by 287 percent and the number of monthly trips grew fivefold, with projected revenue of 20 million dollars for the following fiscal year and more than 200 clients in the portfolio.

The trend continued in 2023: revenue doubled, profit rose 150 percent, monthly trips jumped from 900 to more than 8,000, more than 25,000 carriers were registered and 80 large new clients joined, alongside a strong expansion into oil and gas, mining and agribusiness.

That same year, AvancargoCS was created as a joint venture with Coconut Silo, a specialist in logistics deep tech, with support from BID Lab and the Global Digital Innovation Network, to develop customized supply-chain solutions.

Facilitator, not disruptor

Bertezzolo rejects the label of disruptive player. He prefers to describe himself as a facilitator who improves an industry without breaking it, an unusual position in entrepreneurial rhetoric and one that helps explain the adoption Avancargo has achieved in a conservative sector.

The company no longer sells only transportation. It also sells tools that allow others to manage their own logistics: it operates as a 3PL and 4PL provider and licenses its software to third parties.

When it comes to artificial intelligence, Bertezzolo avoids futurism. Avancargo uses it to automate the reading of delivery notes, invoices, permits and trip-closing documents, as well as to manage daily interactions between operators and drivers through language models.

His interpretation of the phenomenon is more cultural than technical: what changed with the mass arrival of chatbots is that AI became part of everyday life, while training a model for document analysis is now far less complex than it was five years ago.

According to him, the real ceiling is not technological but bureaucratic. Government systems are outdated, document approvals can take days and information often has to be entered twice because printed copies are still required. Interoperability with public agencies and external systems remains his most concrete frustration.

Triple impact without the rhetoric

In 2024, Avancargo completed its certification as a B Corp, a status held by fewer than 500 companies in Argentina.

The environmental component is not decorative: the business itself is designed to reduce empty kilometers, which means less fuel burned for every ton transported. The company has added emissions measurement and offsetting, reforestation agreements, female participation targets in technical areas and training programs for vulnerable communities.

Bertezzolo acknowledges that these initiatives are not currently driven by immediate profitability, but by the expectation of longer-term returns in reputation, efficiency and sustainability.

Expansion without copy and paste

The company operates in Chile and Uruguay, although both markets together represent around 20 percent of its Argentine volume, and it has announced plans to expand into Peru and Paraguay.

Its approach to internationalization is cautious, based on experience: in long-distance transport, regulations change, the way freight is contracted changes and local practices change. Avancargo therefore takes its technological foundation into each market and adapts it to local needs.

Part of that growth has been financed through reinvestment by established industry players, including Grupo Murchison, which has been involved in Argentine freight transportation for more than a century.

What kind of leader he is

By 2026, already established as one of the voices of the sector, Bertezzolo was extending his argument to consumer behavior: delivery is no longer a stage that comes after the sale; it has become part of what the customer perceives as the product itself.

His view of the return on logistics software investment is gradual. Internal efficiency gains and fewer errors can be seen quickly, while greater predictability for the customer is the strategic benefit.

When he talks about the legacy he wants to leave, he is deliberately modest. He does not aspire to become a celebrated figure of Argentine entrepreneurship, but rather to leave a mark by helping lead the digital transformation of an industry that arrived late to almost everything.

His stated ambition is to become one of the early representatives of that new stage. For him, that would be enough.