It has been less than a year since we started in Finland as Claridocs and launched our first MVP. People might think that we are another Finnish startup that is local and will expand to Nordics first before going international. Well, we are not, and we aim to be born global. We have taken the challenge to apply for the first-ever ODX program, and we got admitted. We were one of the 120 startups out of 8000 applications and one of the several selected startups from Europe. As the only startup from Nordics, we are privileged to have the label ODX 1 in our profile.
It has been exciting to meet the other top 1.5% brilliant founders from 25 countries and cultures with various backgrounds. Everyone brings diversity and new inspirations to the community. We are different, but we do share the same goals. It creates that ever-strong bond and relationship where we are the cheerleaders and great supporters of each other's journey.
The great and powerful community network is backing us, and it is a mix of expertise and personalities from top talents, partners, and investors all over the world. We were able to reach out to other startups as early customers. Also, to provide feedback for our product and extend their network to help us to get more intros to potential customers and investors as we understand each other and strive for growth together.
During our 3-month intensive program, we participated in many inspiring sessions and fireside chats with great founders on various topics covering all aspects of building a business. Besides the extensive knowledge base, we also received helpful insights and had an opportunity to learn from founders and their successful journey, where we also had live Q&A sessions exclusively.
ODX offers world-class advisors with whom we can book sessions for different domains and fields of expertise. We can talk about specific challenges and seek their advice. For each startup, ODX also assigns a Build Advisor committed to helping and challenging us throughout our journey - and we are grateful and super lucky to have Anthony Chen (AC), Employee #1 of Flexport.
It has been the most valuable experience and mentorship. We received the means and wings to build our product and business. We are continually encouraged to challenge ourselves to take steps forward. With the help of AC, we found our new direction and evolved our product into a strong and better version - cargodock.io that transforms the inbox into a powerful TMS.
At the end of the program, we had an opportunity to pitch our idea to Ryan Petersen, Founder, and CEO of Flexport. He agreed with the problem we were solving and pointed out the great potential that our product has. It was hard to imagine these successful short-term achievements three months ago when we just joined ODX.
We graduated from 3-month acceleration and are honoured to be the 1st Cohort ODXers, but this is only the beginning. ODX has opened new doors and prepared us for future challenges. We not only evolved into cargodock.io but also became a better version of ourselves with higher expectations and goals to bring disruptive innovations to global trade supply chain management. We understand what it takes, and it will be a long journey and hard work to make our goals come true where On Deck will stand with us along the way.
Also, we owe a special thanks to Hursh Narain from Flexport, who believed in us and gave us this great opportunity! We will bring it on!
