Shippo founders Laura Behrens Wu and Simon Kreuz
Shipping platform firm Shippo has raised another $50 million in capital, just three months after its last $45 million round, doubling its valuation in that time to over $1 billion as it claims 100,000 ecommerce customers and looks to expand internationally via marketplace and platform partners.
The round was led by Talia Goldberg and Jeremy Levine of Bessemer Venture Partners. The firm took part in Shippo’s Series B round in 2017, when Levine joined the board.
The company has also added to its senior leadership team, including Olivier Adler, former VP of financial planning and strategy for Checkr, as CFO, and Naveen Sanjeeva, former VP of engineering for RingCentral, as SVP of engineering.
Shippo founder and CEO Laura Behrens Wu said the company’s main mission is to “enable every business to ship at scale.” Its flywheel-like growth comes as customer growth equal greater package volume, leading to better shipping discounts that in turn attracts yet more new customers. The company doubled its revenue in 2020, according to a TechCrunch evaluation of its gross postage volume, and Behrens Wu expects to do so again this year.
“SMBs or ecommerce businesses that are not Amazon are trying to play catch up with the free and fast consumer expectations,” Behrens Wu said. “We’re changing that from catch up to giving them a head start. We aggregate a lot of shipping volume to negotiate better rates with carriers, using analytics data to benchmark and make recommendations. Customers can focus on what they’re best at, running an ecommerce business, and we handle the shipping.”
Behrens Wu said part of the new funding will be used to build out functionality in the Shippo platform to better serve larger, enterprise clients as well as its bread-and-butter SMB shippers. It’s also looking to expand more into international markets through marketplace and ecommerce platform partners. The partnership list is a who’s who of such firms including Shopify, Magento, Woo Commerce, Wix, Amazon, eBay, Mercari, OfferUP and many more, as well as major and regional carriers here and abroad.
“We’re seeing good success with our platform and marketplace strategy, and the goal is to do more of that around the world through international expansion,” she said.