Global supply chains hide some of the hardest problems in sustainability — forced labour, opaque sourcing, unaccountable emissions. Mercado Labs set out to change that, helping retailers and brands bring greater transparency, accountability and visibility to how they source products across complex global networks. The platform sat at the intersection of technology, retail operations and ESG. Ubuntu partnered with Mercado Labs for six years, from earliest-stage startup through to acquisition, with Ubuntu’s founder operating as de facto CMO inside the executive leadership team.
The challenge
Mercado Labs was building a category that barely existed. Supply chain transparency was fast becoming a board-level concern, but most retailers and brands didn’t yet have the vocabulary, the budget line or the internal owner for it. The company had to educate the market, build category credibility, and convert enterprise buyers — all at once, and all while connecting a genuine ethical mission to hard commercial pain around anti-slavery compliance and sustainability disclosure.
What we did
Ubuntu didn’t operate as a typical agency — we owned the marketing function end to end across pre-seed, seed and Series A. That spanned positioning and brand strategy, website, demand generation, content and sales enablement, evolving the infrastructure as the business grew. A central thread was translating the company’s mission into a commercial story: connecting supply chain transparency, ethical sourcing and sustainability accountability to the pain points and budgets of enterprise buyers, so doing the right thing became the obvious commercial choice.
“Ubuntu didn’t feel like an agency — they were our marketing team, leading marketing strategy at the executive level from day one to acquisition.”
The outcome
Six years of continuous embedded partnership across three funding stages, concluding with Mercado Labs’ acquisition by CargoWise in 2024 — the platform joining a larger global logistics technology ecosystem for its next chapter.