The Italian Startup Reinventing Cross-Border Logistics with AI — From a Milan Basement to New York

By , in AI Italy on May 29, 2026 . Tagged width: 4PL , AI , B4i , cross-border e-commerce , Italian startups , Logistics , pre-seed , SPS Fulfillment , Supply Chain , US-EU

SPS Fulfillment, founded by three Italian co-founders, is building what it calls the world’s first Agentic 4PL: an AI-native orchestration layer that helps US small businesses expand into Europe without the usual logistics nightmare.

Thomas Garufi was 18 when he started SPS Fulfillment from a basement in Milan. No warehouse network. No institutional backing. Just the belief that the way brands navigate international logistics was broken — not because the supply chain itself was broken, but because nobody was helping smaller brands navigate it properly.

SPS bootstrapped past $700K in gross transaction volume in less than a year. Now the company is making its biggest move: relocating to New York City to go after the US-to-Europe expansion market — and raising a $1M pre-seed SAFE at a $6M cap to fund it.

“We are European founders who went to America,” says Thomas. “To compete in this corridor, you need to have lived on both sides of it. We have. That’s not easy to replicate.”

From 3PL Operator to AI Orchestrator

Most logistics companies own assets. Warehouses. Trucks. Relationships with a handful of carriers. That model works for enterprises with the volume to negotiate favorable terms — but it leaves small and mid-size brands in a difficult position: pick one operator, get locked in, and end up paying 30% more than larger competitors for the same routes.

SPS is building something structurally different. Rather than owning logistics infrastructure, it sits above it — acting as what the industry calls a 4PL (fourth-party logistics provider), an orchestration layer that automatically selects, monitors, and switches between hundreds of operators.

The twist is AI. While traditional 4PLs require large operations teams to coordinate logistics networks, SPS uses AI agents to handle decision-making: which warehouse handles this shipment, which carrier is performing below benchmark, and when to reroute. The company claims an automation rate of 90%, compared to an industry average of around 30%.

The logic is straightforward: every operator is specialised. Some warehouses are better for B2B, others for B2C, others for food or electronics. By sitting above all of them, SPS can route each shipment to whoever is best positioned to handle it — and switch automatically the moment performance drops.

“3PLs scale by hiring. We scale by deploying agents,” is how the company puts it.

The US-EU Corridor Opportunity

The target market is specific: US e-commerce brands that want to sell in Europe but lack the logistics infrastructure to do so cost-effectively.

The problem is real. EU e-commerce is projected to reach $1.6 trillion by 2033, but cross-border logistics complexity remains the primary barrier for smaller American brands. Customs, import duties, last-mile delivery, fragmented warehouse networks across 27 countries — it’s enough to make most SMBs abandon the idea entirely.

SPS promises to fix this with what co-founder Leonardo Marcon describes as an onboarding experience as simple as activating a Shopify store. “We take care of everything — import, customs, we set up a legal entity for the client so they can pay VAT, we stock their goods in our warehouses across Europe, and when an order comes in on their e-commerce, we deliver to the end customer.” The brand does nothing operationally. SPS handles it all under one contract.

The company already has two US-to-Europe clients live, with a $60M+ potential pipeline in active conversations.

Thomas puts the network effect simply: “More clients means better volume, which means better rates, which means lower costs. The supply chain gets better over time.”

The Team

The three co-founders are all Italian — one from Milan, one from Venice, one from Padova — and all relocated to New York earlier this year to run the US expansion.

Thomas Garufi (CEO) built the original 3PL operation in Europe before pivoting to the orchestration model. He started building and selling products at 15, founded SPS at 18, and has been running it ever since. Multilingual in Italian, English, and German.

Andrea Gallo (CTO) brings five years of startup engineering experience, most recently at a startup studio where he shipped MVPs across multiple ventures. His focus at SPS is end-to-end automation — eliminating manual operations through integrated workflows and agentic systems.

Leonardo Marcon (CSO) spent years at Salesforce before joining SPS, owning the full sales cycle across SMB and commercial segments. Ten years as a professional basketball player in the Italian league before that. “You learn to perform under pressure,” he says. “Logistics sales is not so different.”

Andrea Gallo and Thomas Garufi with mentor Elizabeth Robinson

The advisory bench is unusually strong for a pre-seed: Lukas Hill from Indaco Venture Partners, Pietro D’Arpa (VP Supply Chain at Procter & Gamble, 30+ years experience), and Elizabeth Robinson, Vice Chairman at Indaco and board member at Brembo. SPS is backed by B4I (Bocconi for Innovation), ITA, Gener8tor, and Plug&Play.

The Business Model

SPS generates revenue through three streams: a markup on logistics transactions, a monthly platform subscription, and a recommerce component through ManyCo that converts excess inventory into recoverable cash.

The asset-light structure — no owned warehouses, no carrier contracts to maintain — keeps the cost base lean and allows the company to scale without a proportional increase in capital expenditure.

Thomas Garufi and Leonardo Marcon, US startup grind

What Makes This Different

The logistics orchestration market already has players. Flexe raised $260M for a US warehouse network. Flowspace targets SMBs with a US marketplace. Legacy 4PLs like C.H. Robinson and Kuehne+Nagel serve enterprises.

None of them do what SPS is attempting: agentic AI orchestration, SMB-focused, with the US-EU cross-border corridor as the core product. The incumbent 4PLs were built before agentic AI existed and require large operations teams to function. The SMB logistics players are locked to their own operator networks. The cross-border specialists are enterprise-only.

SPS sits in the gap — and the European-founders-in-America angle is, as Thomas argues, a genuine moat. “To be a competitor on this route, you need our experience in the supply chain, our network, years of working on the ground on both sides. Nobody else has that on the US-EU corridor.”

The supply chain industry was built before agentic AI. SPS is betting it needs to be rebuilt.

SPS Fulfillment is raising a $1M pre-seed SAFE at a $6M cap. More at spsfulfillment.com