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It’s a big day! Check out the video and discover what inspired Dhruv and Divey to start ShipBob three years ago. Read on to see where we plan to go.
Turn on the news lately, and it seems that the news for retailers is pretty dismal, flagship brands that have been around for decades are faltering. It can be difficult watching those once cornerstones of American commerce struggle. As Ira Weiss from Hyde Park Venture Partners mentions in his latest blog post, “Closed stores, closed malls, even entire retail chains that had weathered severe recessions are now descending into bankruptcy. The economy is booming and overall retail sales are up, and yet household names like Sports Authority, Payless Shoe Source, Radio Shack and The Limited filed for bankruptcy, and other retailing icons like Macy’s are struggling mightily.”
However, there is a shining light in all of this. The National Retail Federation (NRF) expects online retail to grow 8-12% in 2017. Brick-and-mortar retail is projected to grow at just 2.8% — slower than average overall industry rate. What is driving ecommerce growth? The same report cites that the number of online shoppers has grown by nearly 20 million from 2015-2016 and that these shoppers are spending more and more. With the help of services like Shopify, it is relatively easy for ecommerce stores to get off the ground, and consumer’s appetite for the variety of trinkets, snacks, and apparel these stores offer seems almost insatiable.
This growth comes with its own set of challenges. As these ecommerce businesses grow quickly these companies are not always equipped to handle critical business functions like supply chain, logistics, and shipping.
Traditional 3PLs were not created to handle the demands of these fast-growing ecommerce brands. 3PLs were built to support large enterprise brands. This is where Dhruv Saxena and Divey Gulati, co-founders at ShipBob saw their opportunity.
To be successful in this current environment, you need to flip supply chain on its head and start with a customer-first mentality. This is the mindset Dhruv and Divey brought to the industry when they decided to launch ShipBob in 2014.
That customer-first mentality brings us to today with the announcement of ShipBob’s $17.5M in Series B funding led by Bain Capital Ventures. This investment only deepens ShipBob’s expertise in this space with the addition of Ajay Agarwal, Managing Director of Bain Capital Ventures, to the board.
The combination of Dhruv and Divey’s vision with Ajay’s deep industry knowledge will only improve the fulfillment solution ShipBob is already bringing to market. Bain Capital Ventures has made multiple investments in the logistics space and they understand ShipBob’s vision of providing ecommerce businesses an end-to-end fulfillment solution that brings world-class technology together with a network of self-managed fulfillment centers.
As Ajay says in his latest blog post, “ShipBob has built the world’s first ‘full-stack’ logistics solution (aside from Amazon). The fulfillment centers, the warehouse management software, the order management software, the pick-pack software, the demand planning and inventory optimization software, and the reverse logistics software are all built by ShipBob and seamlessly integrated, enabling a level of speed and customer service, unlike any other fulfillment vendor.
ShipBob knows that same-day and next-day delivery is no longer a luxury for consumers. It’s now a necessity for ecommerce businesses to offer not just fast but affordable shipping options to be competitive. Our goal is to enable ecommerce with the best ecommerce fulfillment solution on the market today. We will use this investment to not just continue improvement on our technology dashboard but to strategically expand our fulfillment centers across the U.S., facilitating fast delivery times. This expansion starts with opening the San Francisco facility. Partnerships with carriers like UPS will ensure the best shipping rates available.
As Dhruv sums it up, “The investment from Bain Capital Ventures gives us the ability to scale faster and serve the needs of this rapidly growing ecommerce market. We are raising the bar for what best-in-class service means in the shipping and logistics space. We will continue to innovate and expand to serve ecommerce businesses across the country.”
Check out all of ShipBob’s press coverage and latest news.
