Cavela has secured $6.6 million in seed financing as demand surges for tools that help e-commerce brands navigate rising tariffs and restructure global supply chains with speed and precision. The round was co-led by Susa Ventures and XYZ Venture Capital, with participation from Crossover Ventures, Go Global Ventures, and Propel Venture Partners. The company, founded by alumni of McGill, Harvard, and MIT with deep family roots in global trade, is also backed by operators and investors associated with Notion, Stripe, Flexport, and Anduril.
As tariffs drive up costs and squeeze margins, many brands without large procurement teams struggle to identify reliable manufacturers and switch sourcing regions quickly. Traditional sourcing can take six months or more and requires extensive manual work across fragmented communication channels, middlemen-filled databases, and inconsistent quality checks. Cavela’s platform replaces this old workflow with an integrated system combining AI agents, a proprietary database of more than 200,000 vetted suppliers, and human sourcing experts who coordinate the entire process from product brief creation to warehouse delivery.
Cavela’s AI tools generate complete product briefs from brand specifications and match them to factories worldwide, including manufacturers behind brands such as Carhartt, Ralph Lauren, and Patagonia. The platform coordinates communication, collects quotes, manages sampling, oversees on-site quality assurance, and optimizes freight forwarding. The company reports that many brands save thousands of hours and reduce production costs by more than 35 percent while gaining access to higher-quality suppliers.
The company’s technology becomes even more consequential as tariffs expose underlying vulnerabilities in global manufacturing. Brands facing sudden cost increases often lack visibility into and options for shifting production, whether by returning to the United States or by exploring new regions abroad. Cavela positions itself as an end-to-end sourcing infrastructure layer that allows companies to rapidly build tariff-resilient supply chains and launch new product lines with much greater efficiency.
Cavela also describes itself as the “other side of Shopify,” noting that while Shopify digitized online selling, physical product sourcing remained largely manual. By automating and modernizing the manufacturing side, Cavela aims to complete the e-commerce infrastructure stack and enable brands to initiate production with the same ease as creating an online storefront.
Cavela is now available globally for growing e-commerce brands. Companies can receive quotes, compare suppliers, test samples, and place bulk orders on a single platform.
KEY QUOTES
“We were told there were only two manufacturers who could make our product. Cavela found us three times as many options.”
Anastasia Alt, Founder of Yana
“Tariffs have put e-commerce in an existential crisis. Cavela makes premium manufacturing accessible to all brands. “This is the only team we’ve seen that combines a deep understanding of global manufacturing and AI to solve this problem.”
Ross Fubini, XYZ Venture Capital
“Our unit costs are actually lower now than they were before tariffs. If they had beat our pricing by 10–15% that would have been good.
Jordan Beaman, Founder of Western Welder Outfitting
“If they had beat our pricing by 10–15% that would have been good. They beat it by 65%. Having sourcing, communication and pricing all together makes it easy for record keeping and reference. It’s a game changer”
Lindsay Barto, Founder of The Longhairs (from Shark Tank)
