The Mexican startup Masu, founded by Colombian Alfredo Cepeda, moved over $60 million in plastic raw materials before a global giant absorbed its technology. The company digitalised a sector anchored in manual processes.
The Mexican startup Masu, founded by Colombian engineer Alfredo Cepeda, has achieved what few companies of its kind have: digitalising the supply chain of plastic resins in Mexico and being absorbed by a global operator that operates in over 100 countries. In three years, the platform moved over $60 million in raw materials through 5,300 purchase orders, combining a marketplace with management software for distributors.
Cepeda arrived in Mexico in 2019 to handle paperwork and open a company. The process took him three months. When he returned in 2022 to found Masu, he did it in less than two months. This improvement, small from the outside but significant for those experiencing it, reflects why this industrial engineer bet on Mexico: a country that is changing, an ecosystem that is maturing, and a manufacturing market that, in his words, is nine times the size of Colombia's in terms of industrial GDP.
From Promigas to Frubana: the path to Masu
Cepeda's journey before founding Masu is the kind of résumé that rarely produces an entrepreneur in an industrial niche. He started at Promigas, one of Colombia's leaders in the transportation and distribution of natural gas, where he spent six years learning from executives with decades of experience in real operations. In 2015, he was sent to Peru to set up from scratch the distribution and transportation network of a newly won tender: a blank Excel sheet, an infrastructure to build, and the first concrete lesson on what it means to launch an operation outside your locality.
Then came Frubana, the food distribution startup for restaurants that opened his eyes to the scale of what can be built in Latin America. There, he learned, at the scale of 100,000 restaurants in 10 cities and 1,500 daily routes, what it means to operate complex logistics with technology as the backbone. That experience showed him that the real bottleneck was not in the last mile, but in the raw materials supply chain.
The opportunity that no one wanted to touch
The idea for Masu was born from a specific observation that Cepeda made during his years in B2B supply chains: in the raw materials industry for manufacturing, an average purchase order generated more than ten internal emails before being closed. Phone calls, spreadsheets, manual negotiations, with no traceability of the process or data to make better decisions. It was an industry that moved billions of dollars in Mexico and operated with communication tools from twenty years ago.
Masu was born in 2022 with a model that combined marketplace and SaaS software for the plastic resins industry, polyethylene, and polypropylene, a specific niche within the universe of raw materials for manufacturing. The choice was not random: it is a category with high volumes, concentrated suppliers, and buyers who still depended on personal relationships and calls to manage their inventory. In three years of operation, the platform moved over $60 million in raw materials through 5,300 orders, combining the direct distribution model with software management for established distributors.
The largest design partner turned out to be a global company with a presence in over 100 countries that used the software for almost a year before making a decision that Cepeda did not expect: to lead the digital transformation from within.
Masu was born Mexican, not as an adaptation of something Colombian. The investors, the advisors, the design partners, everything had local DNA. I believed that if I was going to build something here, it had to be born here. — Alfredo Cepeda, founder of Masu
Building in a conservative industry
The challenge of digitalising the supply chain of industrial raw materials is not just technological. It is cultural. Buyers of plastic resins in Mexico have been operating with the same suppliers and the same processes for decades. Trust is built in person, at industrial fairs, in long-term relationships. Coming in with software to tell a purchasing director that they can do the same with three clicks generates scepticism rather than curiosity. Cepeda learned this in the process: the sales cycle in conservative industries is long, behaviour change requires demonstration before argumentation, and the right design partner is worth more than a hundred lukewarm prospects.
The strategy that Masu developed was to focus on large distributors as an entry point, not on end buyers. If the leading polyethylene distributor in Mexico adopts the software to manage its back office, its customers will use it by default. This reduces adoption friction and concentrates commercial effort where the impact is greatest. The model worked: one of the leading global distributors in the industry became a client and eventually the player that brought the product in-house, inviting Cepeda to lead its global digital transformation strategy.
From startup to the global stage
What started as a software pilot in Mexico ended up being the argument that opened the door for Cepeda to a role in digital transformation in a company that operates in over 100 countries. It is not the result he had projected when he raised a round of nearly $2 million and started operations of Masu in 2023. But it is also not a result that dismisses what has been built: it is a company that found real traction in a specific niche, that moved tens of millions of dollars in operations, and that generated enough evidence of value for a global operator to want to take that learning to a global scale and to the team.
That kind of result, rare in the startup ecosystem where more than 90% do not last three years, is what Cepeda reads as validation. The startup not only survived but became the core of a global industrial digitalisation strategy. For readers interested in startups and digital transformation, the case of Masu demonstrates that digitalising an analogue sector in Mexico is not only viable but can attract the interest of major global players. The lesson: identify a niche with manual processes, build real traction, and be open to success coming in unforeseen ways.
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