Table of Contents
** Minutes
Seven years ago, Divey Gulati and I started ShipBob to solve the pain we felt in our own ecommerce business. As a small but growing ecommerce business owner, it was really hard for us to provide our customers with a delightful shipping experience. We built ShipBob to solve that pain point.
Our first fulfilment centre was actually my apartment in downtown Chicago. It’s with those humble roots, that Divey and I founded ShipBob. You can see a picture of this “fulfilment centre” below on the left side.
Not long after, we opened up our first real fulfilment centre in the West Loop of Chicago; a tiny space that totaled 1,100 square feet.
To pay for our rent and grow ShipBob, we would stand for hours outside local Chicago post offices, convincing business owners walking into the post office to use ShipBob instead of standing in lines inside the post office. The most frequent post office visitors (often eBay power sellers) who would spend hours at the post office instantly realised the value proposition of ShipBob and became loyal customers.
From those humble beginnings, we have grown a lot. Today, we have 24 fulfilment centres in five countries that support more than 5,000 businesses for all of their ecommerce fulfilment needs. We are super proud of the progress we have made, and as we increase our international reach, omnichannel partnerships, and B2B capabilities, it still feels like day one for us.
That’s why I am so excited to announce another great milestone in our journey: ShipBob has raised $200 million in Series E funding.
This round was led by Bain Capital Ventures, who led our Series B round in June 2017 and has invested in companies like Jet, DocuSign, LinkedIn, SendGrid, Survey Monkey, Attentive, and Cameo. In this Series E round, we had participation from our prior investors including SoftBank, Menlo Ventures, Hyde Park Venture Partners, Hyde Park Angels, and Silicon Valley Bank.
“The fastest growing ecommerce brands recognise that world-class fulfilment increases revenue and builds customer loyalty,” said Ajay Agarwal, Partner at Bain Capital Ventures and a member of ShipBob’s board of directors since June 2017. “These leading brands are partnering with ShipBob as the one-stop cloud logistics platform to manage and deliver their merchandise to customers around the world. ShipBob’s torrid growth rate and impeccable levels of customer success motivated us to double down and lead this round.”
With this new capital, we will further accelerate our mission to provide world-class fulfilment to brands of all sizes around the world. We will continue to expand our software, build more and deeper integrations, scale our global fulfilment network to even more countries, and bolster our omnichannel ecommerce capabilities.
Since our Series D round in September 2020, we have more than doubled our fulfilment centre network, growing from 10 to 24 facilities. From conversations with many of you (our customers!), we heard loud and clear that fast and affordable international shipping was paramount for your success, so we opened facilities in both the United Kingdom and Australia.
In addition, we have grown our app store from 15 integrations to nearly 40, including new partnerships like Walmart as their preferred TwoDay delivery partner, Shopify Plus as their only certified global fulfilment partner, and Pachama, which allows ShipBob customers to offset emissions and be carbon-neutral on all shipments.
In addition to our merchant-facing software, app store, and new fulfilment centres, we will continue to invest heavily in our warehouse management software (WMS), which powers all of our fulfilment centres. This tight integration of our merchant-facing software and WMS allows our merchants to take advantage of the growing number of locations in the ShipBob network and place inventory closer to their end customer.
This distribution of inventory allows our merchants to run a resilient supply chain and offer cost effective 3-day and 2-day delivery times to their customers.
With this additional capital, we can continue to make even bigger long-term investments in our technology, operations, and support teams, so that you can be even more successful.
Thank you to everyone who has supported our team and our vision in this journey so far. We are excited to share what we are launching next as we continue to invest in the future of ecommerce fulfilment.
