A little over a year ago, Pablo Palafox came on the show as a YC founder building AI voice agents for freight brokers.
He just came back a unicorn.
Zero to a $1.2B valuation in three years. HappyRobot raised a $150M Series C led by Prism Capital and Eurazeo.
DHL, Repsol, Koch on the customer list now. Four industries, three continents.
And they got there by doing what the Silicon Valley playbook says not to.
“Focus on one vertical”. He went multi-vertical: logistics, energy, telcos, insurance.
“Go global late”. He’s already deep in Europe and LatAm, because his customers are global and he’s European, so why wait.
“Sell pure software; services don’t scale”. They do both on purpose. Sending FDEs onsite is their biggest growth lever and moat: they shipped in two days what a rival quoted in three months.
The best companies don’t copy the playbook. They write their own.
A Spanish founder built a US unicorn and now he’s taking it back into Europe and LatAm, the markets the Valley tends to overlook.
Unlike any tech wave before it, AI is diffusing and getting adopted faster than we’ve ever seen.
So the next generation of great companies won’t wait to go global. They’ll build that way from day one.
In the episode, Pablo breaks it all down, starting with why he almost quit HappyRobot to go work as a freight broker.
[YouTube] → [Spotify] → [Apple Podcast]
Also in this episode:
[04:35] When he wanted to quit his own company to become a freight broker
[12:29] Why DHL has more in common with a telco than a regional logistics shop
[32:55] They deployed in 2 days what a competitor quoted at 3 months
[44:35] Why he went global this early
