Founded in 2014 by Dhruv Saxena and Divey Gulati in Chicago, ShipBob, an online 3PL (3rd Party Logistics) fulfillment service has raised $200M in Series E. The funding round was led by Bain Capital Ventures in participation with SoftBank, Silicon Valley Bank, Menlo Ventures, Hyde Park Venture Partners and Hyde Park Angels.
Here is the timeline of ShipBob financials:
- 2015 – Seed round
- 2016 – Round A ($4M)
- 2017 – Round B ($17.5M)
- 2018 – Round C ($40M)
- 2020 – Round D ($68M)
After this Series E, the total funding amount of ShipBob has summed up to $330.5M. ShipBob has not just grown in funds but also in number of employees and customers. ShipBob currently has the strength of 900+ employees and is serving 5200+ online businesses.
Companies like ShipBob — and it is not the only one in this space, with others including Amazon, ShipHero, Byrd, OceanX, Shippo and many more — have essentially built a logistics operation that lets those companies outsource the work of doing that themselves, much as they would use a payments provider like Stripe rather than building a payments flow from the ground up. ShipBob also, by virtue of working with many businesses, creates that economy of scale by bringing their orders and work all together, mimicking essentially what Amazon does for itself.
“We constantly evaluate the needs of our merchants today, where we believe their needs will evolve in the future, and prioritize what can drive the most impact to help make them successful and differentiate from their competitors,” said Dhruv Saxena, the company’s CEO, in an interview.
“Our customers are the brands and we built ShipBob to support their business growth,” he said. “A requisite to supporting their growth is offering fast and affordable shipping across any channel that they want to sell, so we do offer a ‘Prime’ style offering to the brands that we support today. For example, ShipBob merchants can offer affordable 2-day shipping directly through their website and through the marketplaces where they sell, like Amazon, Walmart, Facebook and Google.”
“Due to COVID, e-commerce penetration in the U.S. got pulled forward by 5-7 years and while some of it will revert back as the economy opens up, it is still higher than the pre-COVID levels across nearly all verticals,” Saxena said, citing the company’s own stats that appear to bear this out. “Many consumers who were forced to adapt to online buying are continuing to buy things online. For example, older demographics bought online for the first time and will continue to do so, while younger demographics who bought a considerable percentage of their goods online already, increased that percentage while the size of their buying power increased as well.”
“The fastest growing e-commerce brands recognize that world-class fulfillment increases revenue and builds customer loyalty,” said Ajay Agarwal, partner at Bain Capital Ventures and a board member, said in a statement.. “These leading brands are partnering with ShipBob as the one-stop cloud logistics platform to manage and deliver their merchandise.”
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