From the Phones to the Founder’s Chair: How Two Builders Turned a Broker’s Daily Frustration Into TheCarGo
A former auto-transport broker who lived the industry’s daily chaos teamed up with an engineer to build the AI-driven operating system now running ten U.S. brokerages — and in June 2026 the company closed its first $110,000 round, with plans to launch two new AI agents within months and open a U.S.-led follow-on round before the end of the year.
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Most people who build artificial-intelligence products arrive from research labs and elite universities. Ziyobek Turdiev arrived from the phones.
In 2019, Turdiev took an entry-level job as an auto-transport broker for a U.S. company. He cold-called customers, quoted shipments, booked carriers, and learned a notoriously unforgiving business the hard way – the kind of business where most new agents quit inside their first year. He didn’t. He stayed, and he learned every corner of it: sales, dispatch, negotiation, payroll, and customer service.
By 2021 he had moved into leadership and begun training other brokers – eventually more than 50 of them. He went on to serve as CEO of two U.S. auto-transport companies, Mate Auto Transport and Ocean Blue Auto Transport. In 2023, his team booked over $350,000 in sales while he managed agents, handled customers, and ran daily operations at the same time.
The Problem He Couldn’t Ignore
Running those companies was harder than it needed to be. To get through an ordinary day, Turdiev and his team bounced between as many as ten disconnected tools — a CRM, Super Dispatch, Central Dispatch, RingCentral, payment systems, Excel sheets, email, texts, and handwritten notes. Nothing talked enough to scale. Quoting was slow. Follow-ups slipped through the cracks. Good agents burned out.
After enough late nights, one conclusion became impossible to avoid:
“Brokers don’t fail because they’re bad. They fail because the work takes too long.”
He went looking for software built for people like him and couldn’t find it. The big enterprise platforms were expensive and generic; the niche tools didn’t work together. So he made a decision that would change his career: if the tool he needed didn’t exist, he would build it himself.
Built Inside a Real Brokerage — Not a Lab
What makes TheCarGo different is where it was born. In 2024, while still running his brokerage, Turdiev started building the product for his own company. His own team became its first users, stress-testing every feature against real customers and real pressure.
It was not smooth. He opened a blank Figma file and designed the system he wished he’d had. His first development team didn’t work out, and he had to start over. He paid for everything himself — servers, developers, tools — and drew no salary while still operating the brokerage.
The turning point was a partnership. Turdiev brought on Bakhtiyor Ergashev as Chief Technology Officer and co-founder, handing him the engineering. Where Turdiev brought a decade of operational scar tissue, Ergashev brought the technical depth to match it. Together they got the product live inside the brokerage, then rebuilt the backend properly for scale — new infrastructure, faster systems, and support for many companies at once.
“The product only works because two very different strengths met in the middle,” the founders say of the partnership. Turdiev knew exactly what a broker needed because he had been one; Ergashev knew how to build it so it would hold up under load. Then something unplanned happened: other brokerages saw the tool and asked to use it too.
Going All In
For a while, Turdiev tried to do both — run the brokerage by day and build the product around it. As more companies signed on, that stopped being possible to do well. In April 2026, both founders went all-in on TheCarGo full-time.
By then the timeline spoke for itself. The first paying customer signed in March 2025. More joined through the year. By late 2025 the platform had been rebuilt and was production-ready. Today, TheCarGo serves ten active U.S. brokerage companies — several of them leaving Salesforce, Excel, and standalone phone systems behind because, for the first time, a single platform does the whole job.
Closing the First Round
In June 2026, TheCarGo closed its first round of outside capital — $110,000 from Yoshlar Ventures, Uzbekistan’s state-backed fund for young founders building for global markets, and Yasin Ehsan, a U.S.-based angel investor. The funds are now with the company.
The capital is being deployed directly into the next phase: shipping two new AI agents into the platform, supporting the brokerages already in onboarding, and hiring against demand. But Turdiev is candid that the bigger thing was the signal.
“I funded this myself from day one. Getting backed by a respected fund here and by an angel investor in the U.S. told me we’re on the right path. It’s simple from here — build a better product and keep pushing.”
The company plans to open a follow-on round, led by U.S. investors, in the next six to eight months.
Validation From the Industry It Serves
TheCarGo is approved by both Central Dispatch and Super Dispatch, the two platforms every U.S. auto-transport broker depends on — a non-trivial bar that signals the product is trusted at the core of the industry’s workflow. Along the way the company has earned AWS cloud credits and a grant from ElevenLabs to build AI voice agents, and drawn early advice from senior U.S. founders including Sanjar Ataev (CassidaUSA) and Nodirbek “Bek” Abdullayev (Super Dispatch). The company is incorporated in Delaware.
What They’re Building Next
Turdiev and Ergashev are now focused on what they call a digital workforce — AI agents that can place cold calls, answer the phone, reply to texts, and book carriers on their own. The goal isn’t just a smarter CRM but a full operating system for a brokerage, with AI doing the repetitive work that burns agents out.
The roadmap is concrete. Two new AI agents are scheduled to ship into the platform within the next two to three months. Within six months, the team expects those agents to be fully deployed across the active customer base, with new brokerages onboarding onto an expanded product.
“I built TheCarGo because I wanted a tool that didn’t exist — the tool I wished I’d had when I started.”
The Long Game
The plan doesn’t stop at a working product. Turdiev believes TheCarGo can become the infra for U.S. auto-transport brokerages, and he intends to prove it can be done starting from Uzbekistan. He plans to relocate to the United States in 2026 to be closer to his customers and the center of the market — and, just as deliberately, to show younger founders back home that it’s possible.
His advantage is simple and hard to fake: he is building for an industry he actually worked in, alongside a CTO who can build it to last, solving a problem they both understand at the level of a single missed follow-up.
For the full conversation behind this story, watch our episode on YouTube:
About TheCarGo
TheCarGo (TheCarGo OS Inc, incorporated in Delaware) is an AI-driven operating system for U.S. auto-transport brokerages. Built by a former broker and an engineering co-founder, the platform consolidates quoting, follow-ups, dispatch, carrier communication, and payments into one system — with AI agents handling repetitive work. Approved by Central Dispatch and Super Dispatch, TheCarGo serves ten active U.S. brokerage companies and is onboarding more. In June 2026, the company closed its first $110,000 round from Yoshlar Ventures and a U.S.-based angel investor, and plans to open a follow-on U.S. round within six to eight months.
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