Chicago-based ShipBob is a company that provides inventory management and fulfillment solutions for small-to-medium sized businesses. ShipBob has raised $40 million in Series C funding, which will enable the company to open a new facility and hire more staff. With this round of funding, ShipBob has raised more than $62 million in funding total.
The funding round was led by Menlo Ventures. Menlo Ventures partner Shawn Carolan is joining ShipBob’s board of directors in conjunction with the funding. Hyde Park Angels, Hyde Park Venture Partners, Bain Capital Ventures and Y Combinator also participated in this round.
“The expectation from a customer standpoint is that they will get all of their e-commerce orders delivered to them like Amazon Prime: same-day, next-day,” said ShipBob CEO and co-founder Dhruv Saxena in an interview with the Chicago Tribune,. “These e-commerce businesses don’t have the infrastructure to support that customer expectation.”
ShipBob’s new facility in Chicago is six times larger than their previous warehouse. And it supports same-day delivery for customers in Chicago who order products through e-commerce stores powered by Shopify, Magento, Squarespace, etc. By making shipping costs faster and cheaper for other e-commerce players, it helps level the playing field against Amazon.
“We plan to add more resources to our engineering team — an example being advanced inventory forecasting and planning tools,” added ShipBob co-founder Divey Gulati via Built In Chicago. “We plan to create these tools to help merchants estimate how much sales they should expecting in any given time frame, and thus how much inventory they should be holding and where, when they should be reordering more inventory and at what quantities.“
This past year, ShipBob increased its staff to more than 350 employees from 60. These employees are spread out across the company’s main offices and fulfillment centers in Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, and Dallas. Plus a few more will be opening more facilities in the next few years.
