The Fastest Way to Find an Importer Ready to Sell Your Product

01 /The Concept

xNova helps local manufacturers expand into global markets – offering, as the startup puts it, "the fastest way to find importers" ready to sell their products in other countries.

The pitch is simple: enter a product name or category code and get a list of companies that have already imported similar goods into the target market. More than just a company list, the platform surfaces detailed profiles for each prospective partner – revenue figures, current suppliers, average order sizes, purchase frequency, and even an itemized log of past shipments with dates and volumes.

The same lookup works competitively: see which importers your rivals are already working with, and decide whether to target the same channels or find alternatives to avoid going head-to-head.

Once a target importer is identified, the platform surfaces contact details for specific employees to reach out to about potential supply arrangements.

xNova currently tracks importers in the US, Latin America, and Europe. Its database updates in real time, with an AI layer continuously collecting and enriching the parameters available for search and filtering.

The startup reports that over 12 months, exporters using the platform grow their international partner count by an average of 22% while increasing average revenue per partner by 36%.

xNova was founded in 2022 in Spain, seeded with €200K from the Plug and Play accelerator. It has now raised a new €1M round.

02 /Why It Matters

Cross-border wholesale trade is a massive market. In 2024, it accounted for $155 trillion of the $194.6 trillion in total cross-border payment volume. By 2032, that's expected to grow to roughly $260 trillion out of a projected $320 trillion total.

The real money in international trade isn't in global marketplaces or chasing individual foreign buyers. It's in distributors – companies that regularly buy large volumes of foreign product to move through their own retail and dealer networks domestically. Most founders building global businesses overlook this entirely.

Another startup working this angle is Onex ([related review](/review/lokalnye-posredniki-jeto-globalnye-dengi)), focused specifically on medical products. Onex has built a database of medical distributors across 78 countries, vets them, and delivers a shortlist of qualified contacts to manufacturers looking to enter a new market. It also handles regulatory documentation, marketing materials, and follow-up distribution reporting. Onex has raised $1.2M.

Importers face a mirror-image version of the same problem: finding quality suppliers in other countries. German startup Matchory ([covered previously](/review/eshhjo-odin-sposob-sozdanija-globalnogo-biznesa)) has built exactly that platform for the buy side, raising €6M in a round closed just a week ago.

03 /Opportunities

Many founders dream of building a global business. Most go about it the hard way – searching for a sufficiently "unique" product to earn worldwide attention.

There's a simpler path: build the platforms that help other businesses operate globally.

The most obvious version is exactly what xNova, Onex, and Matchory are doing – infrastructure for finding export and import partners. But the less obvious variations are often more interesting, and tend to follow the same structural pattern: a B2B layer between two parties who already want to do business but can't find each other efficiently.

Nuitee ([related review](/review/takaja-shema-raboty-rezko-stala-vostrebovannoj)) raised $48M on a B2B platform that lets airlines and travel agencies offer hotel bookings in other countries to their customers. Meili ([related review](/review/marketplejs-dopolnitelnoj-vyruchki)) built a similar B2B layer for car rentals, enabling the same intermediaries to add rental options in foreign markets – raising €8.1M in December to bring total funding to €20M. Air Doctor ([related review](/review/hrenovyj-ili-ohrenennyj)) built a global marketplace of doctors sold as a B2B product to travel agencies, airlines, and insurers, attracting $50.9M total with $20M raised last October.

The question worth asking: what cross-border transaction is still running on friction, relationship-dependent processes, and manual coordination? That friction gap is where the next platform lives.