First off, congrats on the launch: $45 million of capital from Sequoia and some other great firms. Why don't you start by telling us about Nuvo? What's the vision? What are you building?

The headline here is that we are building the infrastructure to accelerate the trade of physical goods across the global economy. If you think about what that actually means at a pretty macro level, businesses around the world are pretty tightly interconnected with each other.

Think about the movement of goods. If you're pouring yourself a bottle of wine in New York, the grapes probably came from a California winery. If you're building a house in Florida, the lumber probably came from the state of Washington. Then you get to more complex products. Think about the car you drive around every single day. Then you go complete bananas, where the steel originates in Pennsylvania, becomes component parts in Ohio, then becomes an assembled car in Detroit, and then finds its way into a dealership.

So the key takeaway here is that the free flow of trade between businesses is extremely critical to the functioning of the modern economy, and it really drives standards of living as we know it today. If you look at how these businesses actually interact with each other, how they connect with each other, and how they manage this trade process, it's extremely antiquated and broken.

For example, if you look at a steel refinery versus an auto parts components manufacturer, both businesses have their own internal tools and their own internal processes, but they don't have any kind of shared interface or infrastructure layer that brings them together. As a result, the way both businesses connect with each other is primarily pen, paper, email, fax, and phone calls. Once they've established that new trade partnership, the way they actually coordinate their trade with each other, meaning ordering, invoicing, payments, and so on, is also pen, paper, fax machine, email, and phone calls.

One of our core assumptions here is that the world is better off today because of the connective power of the internet. Consumer social and professional networks have really brought people together. It's easier to stay in touch, interact, and communicate with the people who are near and dear in your life. But when you look at B2B and the importance of these businesses being able to trade effectively with each other, that underlying connectivity and coordination infrastructure is really missing.

So what we're trying to do is create a network of businesses that are able to connect with each other much more quickly and confidently, eliminating the need to run through a prolonged, time-intensive, manual pen-and-paper process. Once they connect with each other and bring all of their relationships into one single interface layer, how can we then help them progressively automate all of their trade activities?

The grand vision is a world where trade is not bogged down by overhead, cost-prohibitive processes, and manual entry. You just have more businesses that may emerge and more connections between businesses that may occur. A given business in the world might have more procurement partners to buy from and more customers to sell to. That's really good for the world. Allowing more trade to happen is, I think, fundamental to why our lives today are much better off than they were maybe 500 years ago, when you were tightly geographically constrained and that informed what your standard of living could be. So what does that look like as we go through the next 10, 20, 30 years in the world of trade? We think it requires a reimagining of the underlying tech and infrastructure to support that scale.

You mentioned that a lot of these companies are still transacting via pen and paper or fax. What percentage of them are truly on pen and paper, fax, or email, and what percentage are using legacy systems like SAP to manage pieces of their workflow?

We work with everyone from the Fortune 500 all the way through the local flower wholesaler down the street, and 98% of the customers we work with use pen and paper. Even if you have SAP, even if you're a Fortune 500 company, you still have a pen-and-paper process, because your SAP is only good for your internal workflows and your internal processes.

All of the customers you sell to and all of the vendors you procure from are not on SAP. They don't live in your system. So you're tracking and logging all of your activities, but that's internal business information. The moment you have to connect with a net new business that you want to either sell to or procure from, you're back to figuring out what the universally acceptable means of interacting with one another is.

That's largely why, even if you look at subsets of what we're trying to target, let's say B2B payments, most B2B payments are still on paper check. It's not necessarily because the technology doesn't exist. It's that if I, as business A, and you, as business B, have our own bank accounts, our own ERPs, our own internal workflows, and our own internal processes, your stack and context do not speak to my stack and context. So the universally acceptable layer we interact through is a check. You reconcile that in your SAP, I reconcile that in my QuickBooks, and we go about our jolly way. But the two of us are not sharing any infrastructure that makes it that much easier for us to coordinate activities with each other.

Is the work you're doing at Nuvo the kind of thing that's only highly successful at scale?

That's a good question. Let's take a step back to how business was conducted 30, 40, 50 years ago. Why do we still live in a world where a lot of the techniques and processes haven't really evolved?

Fifty years ago, if you're running your average business, let's say a retailer or a wholesale business, you have maybe 10 vendors you purchase from. Maybe you have a stable base of 20 to 30 customers you sell to. You're very tightly constrained in what you could do across all your trade partnerships. Fast forward to today, and we have close to 200 million active businesses around the world. So the sheer number of businesses that are active in the world has grown.

The interconnectivity between these businesses has also grown. If you're an average business today versus 50 years ago, maybe you're procuring from 1,000 different vendors, because you want to differentiate your offerings, you have access to a global supply chain, and you want to compete on cost. So you're working with a larger variety of vendors than you would have 50 years ago. And you're not constrained in who you can sell to. Whereas you were maybe selling to 20 or 30 businesses before, now you're selling to 1,000 customers. So interconnectivity is the second parameter that's really grown.

The third thing is the sheer number of activities per relationship. If you and I have a trade relationship with each other, I have to figure out how to onboard you, verify your risk, figure out how to intake your orders and fulfill them, issue an invoice, send you reminders for it, collect a payment, and reconcile it. The number of activities that go into a single transaction lifecycle on a single relationship has also gone up. So you have this triple whammy: more businesses, more connections per business, and more activities per connection, all going up and to the right. And this antiquated infrastructure was never really designed for scale.

Now we could ask ourselves whether scale is a good thing or a bad thing. I actually think it's a really good thing. If you have the ability to procure from a globally diverse supply chain on a cost-competitive basis, you're producing better, more specialized, more differentiated products, because you have access to a wider vendor network. If you're selling to more customers than you were able to before, you're expanding your customer base, growing your revenue, and driving economic activity. So scale is actually a great thing within trade, and anything that impedes our ability to continue to accelerate that scale is, I would argue, a bad economic outcome for the world. What we're trying to say is that with better technology, we don't need to see a deceleration of trade at the scale it's operating at and where it's heading in the future.

Let's talk about tariffs for a moment. How are they affecting your customers so far, and what implications are you seeing?

I think tariffs are just one of many different types of scenarios that businesses in the modern trade world need to adapt to. We had tons of supply chain disruptions during COVID. That's a force majeure. There are changes in tax policy, commodities risk, tariffs, or a hurricane comes in. Whatever happens, all of these types of volatility create a ripple effect within what I like to think of as a trade graph.

If you have businesses, let's say restaurant operators, that are purchasing a lot of white wine from Italy, as soon as tariffs are slapped on white wine from Italy, they start to ask themselves: do I pass those increased costs on to my customers through increased pricing, or do I start to procure white wine from Sonoma County in California, where I'm not seeing that incremental cost difference?

In a world where it's very difficult to scale your trade partnerships in the absence of a centralized network of trade activity like Nuvo, the average restaurant operator needs to fill out a bunch of paperwork and go through the wringer, waiting multiple weeks to evaluate, identify, and get approved for new trade relationships with net new vendors. They might not have access to the same kinds of terms with the new vendors, because they're starting a new relationship, trust is pretty low, and skepticism might be really high. So the friction around adapting the scope of your trade network is quite high right now. It makes you less dynamic and less adaptable, and it makes you feel more of the pain.

Even in a perfect world where everyone said, "Great, I'm not going to purchase white wine from Italy anymore. I'm only going to purchase it from California," the manual, time-consuming, expensive process currently in place to activate new vendor-customer partnerships in the trade world is so heavy that we're collectively spending thousands of years in human time to let this change actually materialize. That's also not a great thing.

So again, how do you reduce these barriers so trade becomes a more fluid and dynamic thing that can adapt very dynamically, and businesses don't feel stuck between a rock and a hard place, reinforcing existing trade partnerships and unable to evolve into new ones? That's really where I see tariffs coming in. How quickly can you adapt is the question every business is considering. The old-school way of saying, "Hey, I found a vendor or a customer, and I'm going to work with them for 10, 20, 30 years, come hell or high water," I don't really think we live in that kind of world anymore.

Last question for you, Sid. If we have you back in five years, and hopefully it's much sooner than that, what does Nuvo look like?

The nature of Nuvo is that we're building a viral network for businesses. You want to connect with a vendor or a customer, you exchange Nuvo profiles. That's how you establish connectivity. So a lot of businesses are coming on board Nuvo very, very fast. We're at about 50,000 businesses within our trade network today. We anticipate that about five years from now, there will be somewhere between five and 10 million businesses interacting within our trade network. So one thing is that the sheer scope and scale of Nuvo is going to look very different a few years from now than it does today.

The second is, what can you do within the trade network? Right now, we're helping businesses manage connectivity with their vendors and customers in a much more seamless way. What else can you do? Can we help them manage their payments, their ordering, and the other coordination workflows that go into managing their trade activities? How much can we deploy AI systems and modern payments infrastructure within the network graph to help businesses level up, so they can focus on their core bread and butter and not the administrative overhead that really bogs them down?

We often see ourselves compared to Facebook in many ways. With V1, it was just that you have your profile, I have mine, we send each other friend requests, and you see if I'm in a relationship where I'm single. That was really V1. But once we have that connection, you can build Messenger, the news feed, an ad marketplace, and video sharing. A bunch of really cool bells and whistles are built on top of that. We view ourselves as executing against a pretty similar roadmap: enable connectivity, then accelerate coordination. That's what the world will look like five years from now.