Roadie, an Atlanta-based on-the-way delivery service with the nation’s largest local same-day footprint, announced it raised a $37 million oversubscribed Series C funding round from The Home Depot, Warren Stephens, TomorrowVentures (an early stage VC firm founded by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt) Including this round, Roadie has raised $62 million in total funding.
This funding round comes on the heels of Roadie announcing recent delivery partnerships with Delta Air Lines, The Home Depot, and Walmart. And Roadie used these partnerships to strengthen its foothold across 224 metro areas around the country. While many of these metro areas launched with consumers and small businesses, but now it has scaled the meet the needs of enterprises as it can deliver anything up to 100 miles around every major city in the U.S.
Photo: Marc Gorlin via Business Wire
Roadie’s on-the-way model taps into unused capacity in passenger vehicles that are already on the road. With this model, Roadie is uniquely positioned to help the largest retailers in America with same-day delivery for millions of customers nationwide even in small cities and towns that retailers struggle to reach. And now the company’s same-day delivery footprint now reaches 89% of U.S. households.
“In today’s hyper-competitive retail environment, it’s not enough to only offer same-day delivery to folks in NFL cities,” said Roadie founder and CEO Marc Gorlin in a statement. “Our model is a game-changer for retailers, wholesalers and consumers who want same-day delivery of any item, of any size, to any zip code, at any time. An investment like this further validates our crowdsourced model, which retailers are fast realizing is a highly flexible, scalable, and cost-efficient option to reach all of their customers, wherever they might live.”
Roadie is going to continue to innovate its dynamic routing and pricing models and expand on its use of machine learning to predict capacity and match deliveries to its community of drivers based on real-time supply and demand. The funding announcement was made at LINK 2019, which is the Retail Industry Leaders Association supply chain conference.
“The Home Depot is committed to building the fastest, most efficient supply chain in home improvement, and our customers have made it clear that same-day or next-day deliveries to their homes and jobsites are a critical part of that,” added The Home Depot Supply Chain EVP Mark Holifield. “We’re investing to bring this level of service to 90 percent of the US population, and Roadie is a key partner for us in making this a reality.”
Ever since launching in 2015, Roadie grew to over 120,000 drivers and delivered to more than 11,000 cities and towns nationwide. Roadie is also backed by the UPS Strategic Enterprise Fund, TPG Capital founder David Bonderman, Alan Schwartz (Guggenheim Partners’ Executive Chairman), and Square co-founder Jim McKelvey.
