- Shippo – a company that removes shipping complexities for businesses and connects businesses to the best delivery options — announced it has raised $45 million in a new round of funding. These are the details.
Shippo – a company that removes shipping complexities for businesses and connects businesses to the best delivery options — announced it has raised $45 million in a new round of funding. This funding round was at a valuation of $495 million.
According to Crunchbase, the idea for Shippo was put together after the co-founders — who previously launched an e-commerce business — dealt with issues around shipping. “We just realized that shipping is really hard and it shouldn’t be this hard, especially because we were using other technology products like Stripe and Shopify that made it easy to set up our store and do payments,” said Shippo CEO Laura Behrens Wu in an interview with Crunchbase News.
How does it work? Shippo displays business orders for e-commerce businesses in a dashboard and displays the shipping options and rates next to those orders. The business manager can sort through those options based on cost and speed in order to determine the optimal choice. Plus Shippo can also print the shipping labels and packing slips for a warehouse. Then it sends the tracking information and return labels to the customers. Currently, Shippo works with over 50 carriers, including the USPS, UPS, and FedEx.
Shippo more than doubled its customer base last year and over 70,000 brands work with the company. Some of the customers include Hims, Touch of Modern, and Aesop.
This round of funding will be used for the company’s growth. And it will be used for investing in products to be used in the platform. Plus the company will be expanding in more places internationally as well.
Some of the investors in Shippo include Twilio CEO Jeff Lawson; Stripe CEO Patrick Collison; PagerDuty CEO Jennifer Tejada; and Pioneer and Cue founder Daniel Gross as well as venture capital firms including Bessemer Venture Partners, Union Square Ventures, and Uncork Capital.
