The View from the Office.

I met up with Mohit Raj in Harlem for a conversation about travel, logistics, and how he ended up co-founding 1PL, a company that helps firms manage their supply-chain operations.

We were introduced by Curtis McCool, a former colleague of mine at Bloomberg who has been advising the company.

Mohit grew up in Toronto where both of his parents were entrepreneurs. When COVID hit, he was still in school. Toronto was heavily restricted. Like a lot of people at the time, he got a dog and took long walks in the city.

He noticed a local business owner packing boxes every day and printing Canada Post labels. The deliveries were short-distance, all within the city. He knocked on her door and offered to take the packages himself. Other businesses started hiring him to do the same for them.

He started the business – called Tayza – with about $1,200 in the bank. He used text messages to coordinate with customers. There was obviously no product or tech team.

He rented short-term, low-cost spaces such as restaurants that were about to close and turned them into small distribution points. Packages were collected in the morning, routes were rebuilt, and drivers loaded quickly.

Daily volume skyrocketed from roughly 100 deliveries to 1,000, and later several thousand at peak. He hired students from the University of Waterloo, used government programs to offset costs, and competed directly with venture-backed delivery companies. He eventually sold the company to a competitor.

After that exit, Mohit stayed focused on logistics. With his co-founder Benjamin Ye, a longtime friend, he began building 1PL with a focus on large enterprise supply chains.

The early concept came from time spent with operators, brokers, and manufacturers, watching where work slowed down and where people had to step in manually.

Mohit’s view of logistics comes from seeing how much of it still runs on coordination rather than systems. Even large manufacturers moving huge volumes rely on documents, email, and escalation teams when something slips. Shipments can be tracked in tight time windows, but delays still trigger people calling, rerouting, and managing exceptions.

He sees the industry modernizing, but slowly. Interest is high, especially among large manufacturers, but change has to fit existing systems. His focus has been on starting from how operations are already written down and run, rather than replacing everything at once.

The company has raised a pre-seed round, including funding from Neo, the venture firm led by Ali Partovi and is working with customers including multiple automotive OEMs.

You can connect with Mohit via LinkedIn or DM me for a warm introduction.