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Six years ago, my co-founder Divey and I were running an ecommerce company and it was finally starting to get some traction. We were working hard but kept running into a logistical bottleneck: the more orders we got, the more time we were spending away from growing our business and instead on packaging and trying to ship out orders on time.
Scaling the business this way seemed impossible, but our options were limited. To meet customer expectations and match the high bar set by Amazon Prime’s 2-day delivery standard, either we could build an expansive supply chain on our own, or give into being yet another commoditized brand on a marketplace like Amazon and rely on them for customer acquisition and fulfilment.
We chose to do the former, but instead of building the supply chain for just ourselves, we did it for every ecommerce brand looking to scale. Thus, ShipBob was born with a mission to give the power of best-in-class logistics to every small to mid-sized ecommerce brand.
Today, that idea has grown from just the two of us to 600+ employees helping thousands of ecommerce businesses shipping millions of items each month get access to a logistics network.
I am so excited to announce another great milestone in that journey: ShipBob has raised $68 million in Series D funding led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2, which has invested in world-changing companies like Uber, Slack, ByteDance, Opendoor, Nvidia, Flipkart, Flexport, Doordash, and Arm.
Our thesis is simple. We believe designers and creators across the world should be able to build products they are proud of and be able to connect with their customers where they want and how they want. To that effect, ecommerce businesses should be able to compete and win on building a better product, and focus on making their customers happy and growing their business — not building a better supply chain.
Since the COVID-19 pandemic began, we have seen a tremendous acceleration in new customers needing our solution. This new capital will enhance our capabilities to bring world-class fulfilment to more customers, hire across teams, fuel growth, expand our software platform, scale our global fulfilment network, and invest more in providing a first-class merchant experience.
To support the influx in demand, we have opened six new fulfilment centres since April, including two international locations. We have also hired hundreds of new fulfilment associates over the last few months and will hire hundreds more leading up to the holiday peak season, in addition to creating new jobs across all teams at ShipBob.
Since we power the entire fulfilment technology stack, from our merchant-facing software to our warehouse management system — which is used within all ten of our fulfilment centres across the United States, Canada, and Europe — we can stand up new facilities in weeks instead of multiple quarters.
Bringing in additional investment from a global leader like SoftBank will allow us to expand our fulfilment centre footprint across the United States and the rest of the world even faster. We expect to open two more US facilities in Q4 2020 and another ten facilities across North America, Europe, Asia, and Australia in 2021.
“Logistics is an enormous industry that has seen rapid growth alongside ecommerce adoption. ShipBob is leveraging data and innovative technology and operations to grow its business and drive significant increases in revenue and profits. The company is on track to be the market-leading solution for SMBs and larger merchants around the world.”
Ervin Tu, Managing Partner at SoftBank Investment Advisers
We will also continue to build out our platform that already integrates with all leading ecommerce platforms and marketplaces like Amazon, Walmart, Shopify, BigCommerce, Wix, and Squarespace. This enables nearly all emerging brands to provide fast shipping to their customers without having to handle fulfilment themselves.
More partners and integrations like returns management, inventory management, and financing solutions can be seen in our apps marketplace to provide brands with a one-stop shop to manage their business, and will continue to expand.
Thank you to everyone who has supported our team and our vision in this journey so far. We can’t wait to see what comes next as we continue to invest in the future of ecommerce fulfilment. We value your partnership and won’t stop until we democratize industry-leading fulfilment for ecommerce brands across the world.
